Russian Neo-Nazi Beheading Video

The video has been removed following discussions with WordPress staff. Try here instead. Repost from the old blog. I am looking for translators to translate this post into Dutch, German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Russian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Turkish, Japanese, Mongolian and Bahasa Indonesia. This post has been translated into other languages. Italian version (traduzione in italiano). French version (en Français). Bulgarian version (Българска версия). Romanian version ( Versiunea română). Spanish version (en Español ). Portuguese version (em Português). Bad reactions have been reported by those watching this video. They are: Vomiting, loss of appetite, rage, sadness, nausea, dry heaves, stomach pains, nightmares, feeling suicidal, fear, shaking, trembling, rapid heartbeat, dizziness, chills, headaches , inability to move, spinal chills, churning stomach, anorexia (weight loss due to not eating), flashbacks, insomnia, crying, laughing and crying simultaneously, agoraphobia (inability to go outside), anxiety, depression , loss of consciousness (passing out), urinating on oneself or feeling one is about to urinate on oneself and inability to stop thinking of the video. Many viewers have said that they were sorry they watched it in the first place and are warning everyone else not to watch it. Be careful if you email the video link to others – people have reported angering their friends by sending this to them. Other fears were more spiritual: some feared that watching this had permanently harmed their souls. More commonly, people said that they would never be able to forget this video as long as they lived. One person has said that they will never be the same after watching this video. Another said they will be frightened for the rest of their life. Others are saying that they will be scarred for life. A few long-lasting reactions, including reactions that look like anxiety, depression or a combination, lasting rarely for months but generally for a much shorter duration. One hospitalization has occurred due to this video. A worker watched the video in his office, was so upset that he went outside to have a cigarette, and was shaking so hard, he could hardly smoke it. He then fainted and hit his head on the sidewalk, knocking out some teeth. If you faint easily, do not watch this video! If you think you may react in any of these ways, please reconsider whether you really want to watch the video. This horrible video seems to be a Russian Nazi reaction, in part, to horrible videos made by Chechen rebels recently in which they behead Russian soldiers. One of the worst of those videos ever made is Six Russian ConscriptsItalian translation (E’ disponibile la traduzione italiana di questo articolo, intitolato Nessuna Pietà per i Russi!). French translation (en Français). Portuguese translation (em Português). In my opinion, it is much worse than this video. New information has just come out proving that this video is real and not a fake. Kistaman Odamanov, a Dagestani, saw the video on the Internet and identified the man who was beheaded as her brother, Shamil Odamanov, 23. Furthermore, the rest of Shamil’s family and many acquaintances in his village also recognized him in the video. Shamil went to Moscow to find work and possibly a wife in 2005. He disappeared in mid-April 2007 and has not been seen since. This implies that he was kept alive for three months somewhere before he was killed in mid-August. Kistaman recognized Shamil by his face and the clothes he was wearing. Russian law enforcement has found where the opening scenes of the video were shot, but they have not found where the executions took place, nor have they found any bodies, blood or other forensic evidence. Nevertheless, authorities are now treating this case as a homicide. German law enforcement is also involved, implying a German neo-Nazi angle. The Tajik in the video, who appears to have been executed by shooting, has yet to be identified. Much more on the story that the video is real and not fake on my blog here. Many have asked the name of the song in the video. The song is “Rus” by the Russian folk-pagan metal band Arkona. This is the Russian neo-Nazi decapitation execution video that took the Russian Internet by storm in early August 2007 (the video topped search engine and blog hits for Russian sites). The video is titled The Execution of a Tajik and a Dagestani. It’s a video of Russian neo-Nazis executing two “Blacks” – that is, two White men – one from Dagestan and one from Tajikistan . For an inquiry into whether or not reasonable people would consider Dagestanis and Tajiks to be White, see my meditation on the subject here. This video aroused tremendous controversy on the Net for a short while after it appeared. A group called either National Socialism/White Power or National Socialists of Rus claimed responsibility for the video, but authorities said they had never heard of either group. Rus is the name of the ancient Viking state centered around Kiev – the Kievan Rus. This was the first Russian state, and the name Rus is widely used by nationalists instead of Russia. A similar neo-Nazi group, the Russian Nationalist Party, can be seen in Youtube videos here and here . The latter video at least has some great music. This video is well done at least, with some great heavy metal music playing in the background. It was shot in early August 2007, soon before it was released on the Internet. The video was originally posted on the Russian version of the Live Journal website by a user named vik23. Western news reports say it was originally posted there by a user named “anti-Gypsy,” but he was just one of the ones who reposted it later. It subsequently appeared on many Russian-language neo-Nazi internet sites. It was quickly removed from most of the sites where it was found, and the National Socialism/White Power site (the name of the group that committed the murders) was overwhelmed with hits. The video opens first with a Nazi flag and a machine gun sound in the background, then a shout in Russian of “Glory to Rus!”. Then it shows a pan of a Russian town in the countryside. Next it shows a lake surrounded by a forest. The camera zooms in on the forest and shows two men bound, gagged and hogtied on the ground. One man is clearly terrified. Next it shows the two frightened men apparently saying, unprompted, in heavily accented Russian, through their gags, “Russian National Socialists arrested us,” as they are bound by hands and legs, kneeling, in the forest. There is a large Nazi flag in the background. The video then shows an extremely unskilled executioner – a masked man in combat fatigues – coming up behind one of the captives and grabbing him to the same shout of “Glory to Rus!” He then starts sawing the poor guy’s head off, but does a lousy job of it. The poor guy screams a bit at first. Yet the incompetent executioner spends far too long – 90 seconds – sawing the guy’s head off. There is controversy about the grunting and gasping sounds you hear as the guy’s head is being sawed off. Some say it is the executioner panting in frustration as he tries to saw off the poor guy’s head. Others say it is the victim himself inhaling blood through his throat or lungs. I’m not competent to judge who is making those horrible sounds. Finally he chops the poor sod’s head off and then tries to put the head on the decapitated body, but the head keeps rolling off the body. He needs to take lessons from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who did an excellent job of balancing US Apache helicopter engineer Paul Johnson’s decapitated head on the rest of his body. Finally, we are shown the other hostage bound and gagged. There is the same shout, “Glory to Rus!,” and he is quickly dispatched from behind with a shot to the head, whereupon he topples into a freshly-dug grave. The video then shows two Nazi bastards, completely covered from head to toe, giving the obvious salute in front of a Nazi flag. Originally, Russian law enforcement was divided on whether or not this video was real, then they decided it was fake, but recently there is proof that it is real, and Russian LE is now treating the video as evidence in a homicide case. I never thought it was fake because you can’t fake a video like this unless perhaps you are a major motion picture company with a large budget. One man was arrested for distributing this video. For more on him, see my post here. Some wonder how any Russian could possibly support Nazis, given that they invaded the Soviet Union, an action that resulted in 27 million Soviet deaths, 4½ times more than were killed in the Jewish Holocaust© that gets drilled into our heads day and night. To understand how a Russian could be a Nazi, one needs to understand the nature of the bloody fascist-Communist struggle in the 20th Century, a history covered up by anti-Communist cant for the simple reason that the fact that no one fought fascism like the Communists would make Commies look good. Study the history of the 20th Century from a real historian, not a professional hack like so many nowadays, and you will see that Communists and Nazis had one of the worst hate-fests of the past century. Those 27 million Soviets did not die in WW2 because the USSR so loved the Nazis that they gave the world 27 million of their only sons and daughters. The same tapestry was played out everywhere in Europe during WW2 – every time the Communists and Nazis faced on the war-field, the bodies piled to the sky and the atrocities – on both sides – were too numerous to count. This was no lovers’ quarrel. The mad, lunatic Nazi invasion of Russia was genocidal in intent and praxis, especially towards the Slavs, whom Hitler considered to be untermenschen. They were seen as an inferior race, a weak “slave race” unable to defend themselves. In particular, Hitler, in his manic and crazed anti-Semitism, felt that (Russian) Slavs had allowed themselves to be enslaved by Jews. He meant the “Communist Bolshevik Jews” who Hitler felt ran the USSR. Since only a bunch of no-good Commie human beings were being genocided during the Nazi invasion of the USSR, this episode has been widely ignored by Western history books. Would Stalin have lost, probably 10’s of millions more people would have died in the USSR and elsewhere, Nazism would have been much more successful, would have menaced the world, and may well have conquered it. The Nazi project was clear; as bureaucrats, they wrote it down. The Slavs (yet not the Estonians, the Caucasians, Cossacks, various types of Turks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Turkmen, Azeris, Tatars, Kalmyks, Karachays, Arabs, Armenians and Georgians) were inferior, to be replaced by Germans through starvation, murder, enslavement and deportation, with the resulting depopulated lands to be given to the Germans for their lebensraum. During World War 2, 6 million dead Poles (only 5 Stalin’s mad purges of the late 1930’s were to some degree wild attempts to stave off the emerging Nazi threat by purging and even executing Trotskyites and Bukharinites who were not only openly sympathizing with the Nazis but were also advocating a Nazi invasion of the USSR, if you can believe that. So the Stalinist purges, criminal and insane as they were, must be seen in the context of the looming Nazi invasion. Yet most of the victims of these purges were innocent people. Without Stalin, it is dubious whether or not we could have defeated Germany. For instance, 8 Stalin’s initial retreats were completely sensible. Behind Russian lines, in occupied Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine and White Russia, a good number of people supported the Nazis. They gleefully joined in the Jew-killing and Commie-killing and fought alongside the Nazi beast. Entire Soviet units went over to the Nazis, especially during the Stalingrad siege, where 50,000 Soviet volunteers fought alongside the German monster. The fate of the nation and many of its residents was at stake. This was no time for namby-pamby talk of human rights. Justice was swift for Soviets who defected to the Nazi enemy, just as it was for the collaborators from other lands, and as the Soviets pushed the Nazi criminals back in the East, many a traitor and collaborator got a swift bullet to the head. Wail about human rights all you want. This was a war. A war to the death. Yet never had the Soviet people supported the regime in greater numbers and with greater passion than during WW2. The notion that Stalin during WW2 was an anti-Semite (parroted mostly by paranoid ultranationalist Jews and crazed anti-Communists) may be laid to rest. As one Soviet author put it bluntly at this time, “You are either an anti-Nazi or an anti-Semite.” The line was drawn. When the Red Army came into Eastern Poland early in the war, they were wildly embraced by the Polish Jews, an action that Polish nationalists have forever condemned them for. But these Jews were not stupid. They knew their enemy, and he was not named Uncle Joe. He had a little mustache, a jerky walk and an outstretched right arm. The USSR was a potential savior of these Jews, and they knew it. Every educated Jew nowadays knows how indebted he is to Napoleon. It’s too bad they don’t feel that way about Joseph Stalin too. Joseph Stalin may have saved all of today’s Jews from Nazism. Joseph Stalin may have saved all of today’s world from Nazism. On to Russian neo-Nazis. With the fall of Communism, the Russian neo-Nazi movement came into full bloom as the economy collapsed, and the search for scapegoats began. The Chechen War made this worse, and the cruelties of the madder Chechen rebels probably drove this incident – they have beheaded some Russians on and off-camera. And Muslim terrorist attacks continue in Russia. “Blacks,” or people from the Caucasus, are hated throughout Russia, and there are regular murders of them. More recently, there have been attacks on African Blacks, Asians and mixed-race people. The authorities do little or nothing to stop the killings, since they support the mindset behind them. Neo-Nazi racism is so big in Russia that it is hard to comprehend in a US context. Already by August 2007, the time of the video above, in Russia there were over 50 racist murders of Caucasians – people from the Central Asian Republics , anti-fascist activists and foreigners – 2 Can you imagine such a huge Nazi movement and attendant crimes in the US? The Russian fascists serve as shock troops for Vladimir Putin, giving the lie to the notion that he is a neo-Communist, and proving, as we Leftists long suspected, that he is just some species of Russian fascist. Distributed along with the video was a manifesto calling for the expulsion of all “Asians” and “Blacks” (people from the Caucasus) from Russia, and then, curiously, for the independence of all of the Russian republics in the Caucasus such as Ingushetia, Dagestan, Chechnya, North Ossetia, Cherkyo-Kabardino, etc. Here is the full text of the manifesto (from the Chechen rebel Kavkaz Center):

Statement of the National Socialist Party of Rus

We Are Part of an Armed Faction of the Party

1. Our party announces the beginning of armed struggle against the Black colonists and those Russian officials who support them. 2. We consider the expulsion of Caucasians and Asians from the territory of Russia to be a necessity. 3. We feel it is a necessity to grant independence to all the republics of the Caucasus (including Chechnya), along with the expulsion of the entire Caucasian population there. 4. We demand the release of all National Socialists from Russian prisons and a halt to the persecution of Maksim Martsinevich. 5. We demand that President putin (in the statement the name was written with lowercase – KC) resign and hand over all power to the National Socialist government, which should be led by Dmitry Germanovich Rumyantsev, the leader of the National Socialist Society of Russia. 6. We recognize the political leadership of a National Socialist Society (NSS). We are the armed wing, operating independently. 7. We will not stop struggling until power is handed over to the National Socialist government.

Martsinevich is the head of a group called Format 18. He has been jailed since July on charges of fomenting ethnic hatred and threatening violence. Neo-Nazi violence in Russia is out of control. It’s also very high in Poland, the UK, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, Hungary and Estonia. There is much more neo-Nazi violence per capita in these places than in the US. Growing neo-Nazi violence is a menace to parts of Europe, and especially to Russia. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

Руснак Neo – Нацист Обезглавявам Виж

The video has been removed following discussions with WordPress staff. Try here instead. Note: Repost from the old blog. Note: To regular readers: This is a Bulgarian translation of the famous Russian Neo-Nazi Beheading Video post. Italian version (traduzione in italiano). French version (en Frances). Romanian translation (Versiunea română). Spanish version (en Espanol). Portuguese version (em Portugues). Shout out to Alexander Sokolov from Bulgaria for this excellent translation. We are still looking for translators to translate this post into into Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, German, Finnish, Russian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, Japanese, Mongolian and Bahasa Indonesia. Regular readers, you really do not want to watch this video. It’s really horrible. Броят на умрелите лица от урагана Катрина може да бъде видян на сайта тук. ВНИМАНИЕ! Този клип е с много страшно съдържание! Екстремни гледки самостоятелна преценка е препоръчително! Ако мислите, че ще се разстроите или по-лошо от това видео, НЕ, НЕ, НЕ, НЕ го гледайте! Ако сте непълнолетни, НЕ гледайте това видео! Ако сте родител и сте загрижени за децата си, не разглеждайте този пост, моля родителски надзор и / или да ограничите вашата детска интернет употреба или инвестирайте в блокиране на програмата. Лоши реакции са били съобщени от тези гледам това видео. Те са: Повръщане, загуба на апетит, гняв, тъга, гадене, стомашни болки, кошмари, усещане за самоубийство, разклащане, треперене, бърз пулс, световъртеж, студени тръпки, главоболие, неспособност да се движи, тръпки по-гърба, стомаха разтройство, ретроспекции, безсъние, плач, смях и плач едновременно, agoraphobia (неспособност да излезем навън), тревожност, ретроспекции, депресия, загуба на съзнание (преминаване изход), уриниране върху себе си или чувство е на път да уринират върху себе си и неспособност да спра да мисля за видео. Тези реакции са били забелязани от геодезични коментари за бюлетин табла и YouTube, където филма и реакциите към нея са публикувани. Мнозина наблюдатели смятат, че те са били причинени от гледания на първо място и са предупреждение всеки друг да не го гледате. Бъдете внимателни, ако сте пратили имейл видео връзка към други хора ,те могат да се чувстват гневни на човека изпратил им това. Други опасения са по-духовни: някои опасения, че им се налага постоянно да гледат клипа и това води до трайно увреждане на техните души. По-често, хора, казват, че никога няма да можете да забравите този видеоклип, доколкото сте живи. Един човек е казал, че той никога няма да бъде същият след като е гледал това видео. Друг каза, че ще бъде уплашен до края на живота си. Други казват, че те ще бъдат помрачени за живот от това видео. Нежеланите реакции обикновено са продължила няколко часа, но някои може да продължат един ден или повече. Двама души докладвали кошмари за седмица, още един човек припаднал от гледането и трябваше да си остане вкъщи един ден от работа, но освен това все още не е имало трайни, сериозни или фатални нежелани лекарствени реакции. Ако смятате, че може да реагира във всеки от тези начини, моля преразгледайте дали наистина искате да гледате видеото. Този видеоклип вече е бил забранен достъп до огромен брой интернет форуми. Има силен призив да го махна от Интернет или не и да го обявят за незаконен. В крайна сметка, това е реален филм, и хората са тези, които да преценят. Това е почти толкова зло като детска порнография, защо хората тайно копнеят да видят такива ужасни неща ,те мразят толкова много. Гледай сега, ако си посмял, преди ченгетата във вашия регион да забранят клипа сега и завинаги. Тази публикация е преведен на различни езици. Италианската версия (traduzione в Italiano). Френската версия (EN Франсис). Това ужасно видео изглежда е руска нацистка реакция, в отговор на д ужасните клипове, направени от чеченски бунтовници наскоро, в които те обезглавяват руски войници. Един от най-лошите от тези видеоклипове, направени някога, шест руски наборни, може да се види в този блог тук (италиански превод, озаглавен Без милост за руснаците (Е “disponibile ла traduzione Italiana Di questo articolo, intitolato “Nessuna Пиета на I Руси“!),  френски превод (EN Франсис). По мое мнение, е много по-лошо от това видео. току що излезе нова информация, доказваща, че този клип е реален и не е фалшив. Kistaman Odamanov, A Dagestani, видях видеото в Интернет и идентифициран човекът, който е бил обезглавен, както моят брат, Shamil Odamanov, 23. Освен това, до края на Shamil семейството и много познати в селото също признават смърта му във видеоклипа. Shamil отиде в Москва да си намери работа и евентуално за жена през 2005 година. Той изчезна в средата на април 2007 г. и не е виждан от тогава. Това предполага, че той е бил жив, отглеждан в продължение на три месеца някъде, преди да е убит в средата на август. Kistaman познава Shamil с лицето му и дрехите, с които той е бил облечен. Руските правоохранителни органи са уведомени , когато когато са показани сцени от видеото. Не бяха открити съдебномедицински доказателства, нито са намерени всички органи, кръв и други . Въпреки това, властите приемат този случай като убийство. Немски правоприлагащите също участват, което означава,че има немски нео-нацистки връзки. Таджиките във видеоклипа, който изглежда, че са били убити от снимките, все още предстои да бъдат идентифицирани. Много повече за историята,за това че видеото е реално, а не имитация на моя блог тук. Много хора искат името на песента във видеото. Песента е “Rus” от руската народно-езическа метъл банда Arkona. Можете да гледате видео на песента в този блог тук. Имате нужда от широколентова връзка за видео да го гледате добре. Това е руско нео-нацистко изпълнение на видео обезглавяване, което поде бури из руския Интернет в началото на август 2007 г. (видео гарнирани търсачката и блог хитове за руските сайтове). Клипът е озаглавен изпълнението на таджикски и Dagestani. Това е видео на руския нео-нацистите изпълняващата две убийства на мъже – един от Дагестан и един от Таджикистан. За проверка на това дали разумни хора биха помислили ,че дагестанците и таджиките са бели хора виж ми размишленията по този въпрос тук. Това видео направи огромни противоречия в мрежата за кратко време, след като се появи. А група, наречена Национална бяло социализма / Бяла мощност или национален социалисти на Рус твърдеше, че има отговорност за видеото, но властите казват, че никога не са чували за тази група. Рус е името на древно Viking състояние центрирано около Киев – на Киевска Рус. Това е първото име на Русия, както и името Rus е широко използван от националисти, вместо на Русия. Подобна нео-нацистката група, руски националистическата партия, може да се види в YouTube видеоклипове, тук и тук. Последните видео поне има някои много музика. Този видеозапис е добре направено най-малко с някои много тежки метъл музиката свири във фонов режим. Той е заснет в началото на август 2007 г., скоро преди това клипа да ее пуснат в Интернет. Видеото беше първоначално афиш на руската версия на живо вестник сайт от потребител на име vik23. Western новини доклади казват, че първоначално е бил там, публикувани от потребител на име “анти-цигански”, но той е само един от тези, които reposted по-късно. Той в последствие се появили много руски език нео-нацистки интернет сайтове. Тя бързо се отстранява от по-голямата част от местата, където е установено, и Националната социализма / Бяла Power сайт (името на групата, която извършени убийствата) бе претоварени с хитове. Видеото се отваря първо с нацистки флаг и картечница звук във фонов режим, след това възклицание на руски на “Слава на Русия”. Тогава той показва план на руския град в провинцията. Напред той показва езеро заобиколено от гора. Камерата увеличава в по гората и показва двама мъже. Един човек е ясно ужасен. Напред той показва двете уплашени мъже, очевидно казва с силен руски акцент, “Руски национал -социалисти ни арестуваха”, те са с обвързани ръце и крака, на колене, в гората. Налице е голям нацистки флаг във фонов режим. Видеото след което показва изключително неквалифицирани палач – маскиран мъж в идва зад един от пленниците и сграбчвайки го казва същия възглас “Слава на Русия!” След това започва да му реже главата. Горкото момче издава крясъци малко по-рано. Но некомпетентният палач муй реже главата прекалено дълго 90 секунди. Има спор относно някои звуци, които се чуват според едни е от палача мъчейки се да му отреже глава, според други от самата жертва. Накрая той се опитва да сложи главата на мъртвото тяло, но държи главата подвижния от тялото. Той трябва да се вземат поуки от Ал Кайда на Арабския полуостров, които не отлична работа на балансирането САЩ Apache хеликоптер инженер Пол Джонсън на decapitated главата на останалата част от тялото му. И накрая, се показват останалите заложници обвързани. В съшото време се извиква, “Слава на Русия!”, и обвързаният е застрелян и пада в изкопан гроб. Видеото след това показва две нацистки копелета, напълно покрити от главата до петите, които очевидно поздравяват пред нацистки флаг. Първоначално, руските правоприлагащи са разделени по въпроса дали, това видео е истинско или не, тогава те решават, че е фалшиво, но напоследък има доказателства, че е истина. Никога не съм си представял, че е фалшиво, защото вие не можете да снимате фалшиво видео така, освен ако може би ако не сте кино компания с голям бюджет. Един човек е бил задържан за разпространение на това видео. За повече информация за него, виж моя пост тук. Чудно е как всички руснаци евентуално биха могли да подкрепят нацистите, като се има предвид, че те навлизат в Съветския съюз, действие, което води до 27 млн. съветски смъртни случаи, 4 ? пъти повече, отколкото са били убити в еврейския Холокост. За да разберете как руснак би могъл да бъде нацист,първо трябва да разберете естеството на кървавата фашистка-комунистическа борба в 20-ия век, история, обхванати от анти-комунистическа невъзможен за проста причина, че фактът, че никой няма да воюва като фашизъм на комунистите ще направи да изглеждат добре. Изследване на историята на 20-ти век от историка реална, а не професионални рязка рана като мнозина наши дни, а вие ще видите, че комунистите и нацистите бяха едни най-мразените на миналия век. Тези 27 милиона руснаците не умряха в WW2, защото СССР толкова възлюби нацистите, които те дадоха на света 27 милиона само от техните синове и дъщери. Същото гоблен е фалирал навсякъде в Европа по време на WW2 – всеки път, когато комунистите и нацистите са изправени на войната-област, на органите, прибрана към небето и жестокости – и от двете страни – са твърде много да се разчита. Това не е любовна кавга. The Mad, лунатични нацистката инвазия на Русия бе genocidal при намерение и практика, особено по отношение на славяните, които Хитлер счита за untermenschen. Те се разглеждат като лоши раса, слаб “славянски раса” не може да се защитават сами. В частност, Хитлер, в неговото маниакално луд и анти-семитизма, почувствах, че (руски) славяни имали право сами да бъде поробен от евреи. Той разбира “комунистическа болшевик евреи”, които Хитлер почувствах се завтече СССР. Тъй като само няколко от не-добри Commie човешките същества са били genocided по време на нацистката инвазия на СССР, този епизод е бил широко пренебрегвани от Западните история книги. Бихте Сталин са изгубени, може би 10 години на милиони повече хора ще са умрели в СССР и на други места, нацизма би била много по-успешно, ще имат menaced света, и може добре да го завладява. В нацистка проект беше ясно, както бюрократи, те написах го. Славяни (още не е естонци, на бялата раса, Cossacks, различните видове турци, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, туркменски, Azeris, татари, Kalmyks, Karachays, араби, арменци и грузинци), са били лоши, да се замени с германците чрез гладуване, убийство , поробването и депортиране, получената обезлюдени земи да се обърне внимание на германците за тяхното lebensraum. По време на Втората световна война 2, 6 милиона мъртви поляците (само 5 Сталин на луд purges на късното на 1930 бяха до известна степен див опити да отклонявам очертаващия нацистка заплаха от прочистване и дори изпълняващата Trotskyites и Bukharinites, които бяха не само открито sympathizing с нацистите, но също бяха застъпничество в нацистка инвазията на СССР, ако Вярвам, че мога. Така Stalinist purges, наказателни и луди, тъй като те са, трябва да се разглежда в контекста на looming нацистката инвазия. Но по-голямата част от жертвите на тези purges са невинни хора. Без Сталин, е съмнително дали не бихме могли да имат победена Германия. Така например, 8 Сталин първоначалното retreats бяха напълно разумен. Зад руските линии, заети в Латвия, Литва, Естония, Украйна и Русия на бялото, добра броят на хората, подкрепени нацистите. Те се присъединиха gleefully в юдеина-убиване и Commie-убийството и воюва заедно с нацистки звяр. Цяло Съветския единици преминаха на нацистите, особено по време на обсадата Stalingrad, където 50000 съветски доброволци воюва заедно с германския чудовище. Съдбата на нацията, и много от неговите жители бе поставено на карта. Това не беше време за лигав говорим за човешки права. Правосъдие е бързото за руснаците, които defected с нацисткия враг, както беше за сътрудници от други земи, както и на руснаците избута на нацистки престъпници обратно в Изток, много предател на родината и трябва бързо куршум в главата. Лелекайте за правата на човека всичко, което искаш. Това е война. А войната до смърт. Но никога не са имали съветски хора поддържат режима с по-големи номера, както и с голяма страст, отколкото по време на WW2. Идеята, че Сталин през WW2 е анти-семит (parroted най-вече от параноидна ultranationalist евреи и луд анти-комунисти), могат да бъдат предвидени за отдих. Като един съветски автор да я тури bluntly в този момент, “Вие сте или анти-нацистки или анти-семит.” Линията е изготвена. Когато Червената армия влезе в Източна Полша в началото на войната, са били wildly прегърна от полски евреи, за действие, че полските националисти са завинаги осъден за тях. Но тези евреи не са глупави. Те знаеха си враг, и той не беше наречена Чичо Джо. Той имаше малко мустак, A цвърчащо пеша и простряната дясната ръка. В СССР е потенциален спасител на тези евреи, и те са знаели това. Всеки образован евреин днес знае как той е задължен да Наполеон. Това е твърде лошо те не се чувстват по този начин за Йосиф Сталин също. Йосиф Сталин може да са записани всички от днешните евреи от нацизма. Йосиф Сталин може да са записани всички днешната света от нацизма. На към руския нео-нацистите. С падането на комунизма, Руската нео-нацистки движение влезе в пълен разцвет на икономиката срива, както и търсенето на scapegoats започна. В чеченския война направи това лошо, а cruelties на ализарин чеченски бунтовници, които вероятно изпъди този инцидент – те са обезглавени някои руснаци и изключване-камера. Вижте една от най-ужасни от тези видеоклипове, ако можете да го носят, за този блог тук. И мюсюлмански терористични нападения продължи и в Русия. “Черни”, или хора от Кавказ, са мразени цяла Русия, и там са редовни убийства от тях. По-скоро е имало нападения срещу африканската Черни, азиатци и смесена раса хора. Властите направя малко или нищо за спиране на убийствата, тъй като те поддържат нагласи зад тях. Нео-нацистки расизъм е толкова голям, че в Русия, че е трудно да разберат в САЩ контекст. Още от август 2007 година в Русия е имало над 50 расистки убийствата на бялата раса – хора от Централна Азия републики, анти-фашистка активисти и чужденци – 2 Можеш ли да си представиш такъв огромен нацистки движението и съпътстващи престъпления в САЩ? Руските фашисти служи като шок войски за Владимир Путин, като в лъжа схващането, че той е нео-комунистическа и доказване, тъй като ние Leftists дълго подозира, че той е просто някакъв вид руски фашист. Разпределени заедно с видеото е манифест призовава за експулсирането на всички “азиатци” и “Черни” (хора от Кавказ) от Русия, а след това, с любопитство, за независимост на всички от руски републики в Кавказ като Ингушетия , Дагестан, Чечения, Северна Осетия, Кабардино-Cherkyo и др Ето пълният текст на Манифеста (от чеченски бунтовник Kavkaz Център):

Декларация на Народното Социалистическата партия на Rus

Ние сме част от въоръжено крило на партията

1. Нашата страна, обявява началото на въоръжена борба срещу Черно colonists и тези руски служители, които ги подкрепят. 2. Ние считаме за експулсиране на бялата раса и азиатци от територията на Русия, че е необходимост. 3. Смятаме, че е необходимо да се предостави независимост на всички републики от Кавказ (включително Чечня), заедно с експулсирането на целия кавказки населението там. 4. Настояваме за освобождаването на всички Национален социалисти от руските затвори и да се спре преследването на Maksim Martsinevich. 5. Настояваме, че президентът Путин (в изявлението на име написани с малки букви – KC) подаде оставка и власт над цялата страна до Народното социалистите правителство, който трябва да бъде водена от Дмитрий Germanovich Rumyantsev, лидер на Национално дружество на социалистите Русия. 6. Ние признаваме, на политическото ръководство на Национална Социалистическа общество (НЗК). Ние сме въоръжени крило, работещи независимо една от друга. 7. Ние няма да спрем, докато се борят мощност не е предоставен на Народното социалистите правителство. Martsinevich е начело на група, наречена Формат 18. Той бе арестуван след юли по обвинение в fomenting етническата омраза и насилие, застрашаващи. Нео-нацистки насилие в Русия е извън контрол. То също е много високо в Полша, Обединеното кралство, Чешката република, Словакия, Германия, Унгария и Естония. Има много по-нео-нацистки насилието на глава от населението в тези места, отколкото в САЩ. Нарастваща нео-нацистки насилие е заплаха за части на Европа.

Neo-Naziste Decapitare Video

The video has been removed following discussions with WordPress staff. Try here instead. Note: Repost from the old blog. This is a Romanian translation of the Neo-Nazi Beheading Video post that was so popular on the old blog. This excellent translation was done by Loghin Alexandru from Romania. This post has been translated into other languages. Italian version (traduzione in italiano). French version (en Frances). Versiunea Italiana (traduzione in italiano). Versiuna franceza (en Frances). Acest video oribil pare sa fie o reactie a nazistilor rusi catre filmarile groaznice facute recent de catre rebelii ceceni in care decapitau soldati rusi. Una dintre cele mai oribile inregistrari facute vreodata Six Russian Conscripts poate fi vazut aici.In opinia mea e mult mai grav decat acest video. Noi informatii tocmai au fost au iesit la iveala demonstrand ca acest video este REAL si nu un fals. Kistaman Odamanov un Dagestan a vazut acest video pe Internet si l-a identificat pe acel om care a fost deapitat, ca fiind fratele ei, Shamil Odamanov, 23. Mai mult , restul familiei si multe cunostinte din sat l-au recunoscut in aceasta inregistrare. Shamil a plecat in Moscova pentru a gasi ceva de munca si posibil o sotie in 2005. A disparut in aprilie 2007 si nu a mai fost vazut de atunci. Acest lucru implica faptul ca a fost tinut undeva timp de 3 luni inainte de a fi omorat in milocul lunii august. Kistman l-a recunoscut pe Shamil dupa faţa si dupa imbracamintea pe care o purta. Politia rusa a descoperit locul in care s-a filmat scena , dar nu a aflat locul unde s-au desfasurat executiile si nici nu a gasit sange, trupurile barbatilor sau alte dovezi. Cu toate acestea autoritatile trateaza acest caz ca homicid. Politia germana este de asemena incurcata in acest caz, implicand o legatura neo-Nazista. Barbatul persan din acest video, care a fost executat prin impuscare inca nu a fost identificat. Numele melodiei din acest video este “Rus” si este compusa de grupul de muzica metal folk Arkona. Acesta este video-ul neo-Nazist rus al executiei ce a luat cu asalt Internetul rusesc. Acest video este intitulat The Execution of a Tajik and a Dagestani. Este un video in care sunt executati doi “negri” adica doi oameni albi unul din Dagestan si unul din Tajikistan. Pentru mai multe detalii despre etniile din Dagestan si Tajikistan click aici. Acest video a starnit controverse enorme pe net pentru o scurta perioada de timp dupa ce a aparut. Un grup numit fie National Socialism/White Power fie National Socialists of Rus au revendicat responsabilitatea pentru acest video, dar autoritatile au spus ca nu au auzit niciodata de aceste grupari. Rus este numele vechiului stat viking localizat in jurul Kievului – Rusia Kieveană. Acesta a fost primul stat rus si numele Rus este utilizat pe scara larga de catre nationalisti in loc de Rusia. Un grup neo-Nasist similar “Russian Nationalist Party ” poate fi vazut pe Youtube aici si aici. Video-ul a fost postat prima data pe un website rus (gen Live Journal) de un user numit vik23. Rapoartele de stiri din vest spun ca initial video-ul a fost postat de un user numit “anti-Gipsy” dar el era doar unul din cei care au repostat mai tarziu. Ulterior a aparut pe mai multe site-uri in limba rusa neo-Naziste. A fost repede eliminat de pe site-urile unde a fost postat initial, si site-ul grupului National Socialism/White Power (cei care au comis crimele) a fost destul de vizitat. Video-ul incepe cu un steag nazist si un sunet de mitraliera pe fundal, apoi un strigat in rusă “Glory to Rus!”. Apoi arata o portiune de tara dintr-un oras rus. Camera schimba unghiul de vedere si arata doi oameni legati la picioare si la maini . Un barbat este in mod clar ingrozit , apoi ii arata pe amandoi speriati ce spun aparent cu un accent rus : “Socialistii Nationali Rusi ne-au arestat”, unde sunt ingenuncheati si legati la picioare si la maini. In fundal se vede un steag mare nazist. Video-ul arata apoi un “călău” extrem de prost calificat – un om mascat in haine de lupta – venind din spatele unui prizonier, apucandu-l si in acelasi timp urland : “Glory to Rus”. Apoi incepe taierea capului saracului om, dar face o treaba destul de proasta. Bietul om tipa un pic la inceput. Cu toate acestea călăul incompetent petrece prea mult timp – 90 seconds – pentru ai taia capul omului. In cele din urma reuseste sa-i taie capul si incearca sa-l puna pe corpul decapitat. Dar capul cade in repetate randuri de pe corp nefind fixat intr-un fel. Ar trebui sa ia lectii de la Al Qaeda din Peninsula Arabica care au facut o treaba excelenta in decapitarea lui Paul Johnson , un inginer de elicopter. In cele din urma ne este aratat celalalt ostatic legat . Acelasi salut “Glory to Rus” apoi este impuscat din spate si aruncat intr-o groapa proaspat sapata. Video-ul ii arata apoi pe cei doi nazisti salutand in fata unui steag nazist. Initial autoritatile ruse nu stiau daca acest video era real sau nu, apoi au decis ca este fals, dar recent exista dovezi ca este foarte real. N-am crezut niciodata ca acest video este fals pt ca nu poti falsifica asa ceva poate in exceptia cazului in care esti o companie de filme cu buget mare. Un om a fost arestat pentru distribuirea acestui material. Pentru mai multe detalii aici. Unii s-ar intreba cum ar putea rusii sai suporte pe nazisti, dat fiind faptul ca au invadata Uniunea Sovietica, o actiune ce a dus la 27 de milioane decese, mai multi decat in Holocaustul Evreiesc. Incearca sa studiezi istoria sec. al 20-lea de la un adevarat istoric, nu de la un nestiutor, si o sa vezi ca nazistii si comunistii au avut una din cele mai sangeroase lupte din ultimul secol. Acei 27 de milioane de sovietici nu au murit in Al Doilea Razboi Mondial pt ca URSS îi iubea asa mult pe nazisti incat le-au dat 27 de milioane de oameni. Acelasi exemplu a fost folosit in Europa in timpul celui De Al Doilea Razboi Mondial , de fiecare data cand comunistii si nazistii se confruntau pe terenul de lupta, cadavrele erau infinite si atrocitatile-din ambele tabere- erau prea numeroase pt a fi numarate. Invazia nebuna a nazistilor din Rusia a fost necrutatoare in special fata de slavi, pe care Hitler îi considera a fi untermenschen (oameni inferiori). Ei erau vazuti ca o rasa inferioara, o rasa slaba de sclavi care nu se putea apara singura. In special, Hitler în a sa lupta nebuna nebuneasca impotriva evreilor, a fost de parere ca slavi rusi si-au permis singuri sa fie inrobiti de evrei. El s-a referit la evreii comunisti bolşevici. Proiectul nazist era clar : ca birocrati, ei l-au scris pe hartie. Slavii ( caucazieni, cazaci, turci, uzbekistani, tătari, arabi, armeni, georgieni) erau inferiori, si aveau sa fie inlocuiti de germani prin infometare, ucideri, deportari; pamanturile depopulate urmand sa fie cedate Germaniei pt lebensraum (in germana inseamnă habitat sau spatiu de locuit). In timpul celui De Al Doilea Razboi Mondial, 6 milioane de polonezi (5 Inlaturarile nebune ale lui Stalin din anii 1930 erau la un anumit grad incercari salbatice de a intarzia amenintarea nazista prin inlaturarea su chiar executarea lui Trotskyites and Bukharinites care nu numai simpatizau cu nazistii dar si sustineau o invaziei a URSS. Asa ca inlaturarile lui Stalin, criminale si nebune cum sunt ele, trebuie vazute in contextul procesului de aparitie a invaziei naziste.Totusi cele mai multe victime ale acestor inlaturari au fost oameni nevinovati. Fara Stalin este nesigur daca am fi putut sau nu invinge Germania. De exemplu 8 Retragerile lui Stalin erau destul de sensibile. In spatele linilor ruse ocupate in Letonia, Lituania, Estonia, Ucraina si Rusia Alba nazismul a fost sprijinit de un numar mare de oameni. Ei s-au alaturat cu bucurie in uciderea comunistilor si a evreilor si au luptat alaturi de nazisti. Toate unitatile sovietice au napustit asupra nazistilor, in special in timpul asediului din Stalingrad, unde 50.000 de voluntari rusi au luptat alaturi de Germania. Soarta natiunii si a multor din rezidentii ei era in joc. Nu era timpul pt o conversatie lacrimogena despre drepturile omului. Justitia a fost rapida pentru sovietici care s-au alaturat nazistilor, asa cum a fost si pentru colaboratori din alte tari. Si cum sovietici îi alungau pe criminalii nazisti inapoi in est, multi dintre tradatori au fost impuscati. Cand Armata Rosie a sosit in Polonia de Est, erau primit cu bratele deschise de catre evreii polonezi, o actiune in care nationalistii polonezi au fost condamnati mereu. Dar evreii nu erau prosti. Ei isi stiau inamicul. URSS era un potential salvator pt ei si stiau asta. Fiecare evreu stie acum cat de indatorat îi este lui Napoleon. Pacat ca nu simt asta si pentru Stalin. Joseph Stalin probabil i-a salvat pe evreii de azi de nazism. Inapoi la rusi neo-nazisti. Odata cu caderea comunismului miscarea neo-nazista a intrat in forta odata ce economia s-a prabusit si cautarea caprelor ratacite a inceput. “Negrii” sau oamenii caucazieni sunt detestati in Rusia si exista crime regulate. Mai recent au fost atacuri asupra negrilor africani, asiatici. Autoritatile fac nimic sau deloc pentru a oprii aceste asasinate. Neo nazismul rusesc este asa de mare in Rusia incat este greu de inteles intr-un context american. In august 2007 au fost peste 50 de crime rasiste , 2 Iti poti imagina o miscare nazista asa de mare si asa de multe crime in SUA? Fascistii rusi servesc ca trupe de soc pentru Vladimir Putin, ideea fiind ca el e un neocommunist, si demonstreaza ca el este doar o specie de fascist rus. Alaturi de video era si un manifest ce facea apel la expulzarea tuturor “asiaticilor” si “negrilor” din Rusia si independenta tuturor republicilor rusesti din Caucaz precum: Ingushetia, Dagestan, Chechnya, North Ossetia, Cherkyo-Kabardino. Acesta este intreg manifestul (de la centrul rebel cecen Kavkaz):

Declaratia de la Partidul National Socialist din Rus

Suntem parte a unei factiuni armate a partidului

  1. Partidul nostru anunta inceperea unei lupte impotriva colonistilor negri si a tuturor oficialilor rusi care îi suporta.
  2. Consideram ca este necesara expulzarea caucazienilor si asiaticilor de pe teritoriul rus.
  3. Credem ca e o necesitate sa acordam independenta tuturor republicilor din Caucaz (incluzand si Chechnya) si expulzarea intregii populatii din Caucaz.
  4. Cerem eliberarea tuturor natinalistilor socialisti din inchisori si oprirea executiei lui Maksim Martsinevich.
  5. Cerem ca presedintele Putin sa demisioneze si sa cedeze toata puterea guvernului national socialist care ar trebui condus de Dmitry Germanovich Rumyantsev liderul Societatii Nationale Socialiste din Rusia.
  6. Recunoastem conducerea politica a Societatii Nationale Socialiste.Suntem o putere armata ce opereaza independent.
  7. Nu ne vom opri pana ce puterea nu va fi preluata de guvernul National Socialist.

Martsinevich este liderul grupului numit Format 18 (18 este o prescurtare nazista a initialelor lui Hitler).A fost inchis din iulie pentru incurajarea uri etnice si pentru amenintari cu violenta. Violenta neo nazista in Rusia este scapata de sub control. De asemenea este foarte mare si in Polonia, Anglia, Republica Ceha, Slovacia, Germania, Ungaria, Estonia. Este mai multa violenta neo nazista pe capitala decat in SUA. Violenta neo nazista care creste este o amenintare pentru unele parti din Europa. Ceva trebuie facut si repede.

Is This Galician?

I assume this is Galician? Here it is, from a Maoist list that I am a member of:

Ben-queridos camaradas: Co motivo da celebracion do decimo tercer aniversario do Inicio da Guerra Popular no Nepal queremos felicitar ao PCN (m) ao heroico Exercito Popular de Liberación e ao povo do Nepal. A Guerra Popular e o proceso revolucionario no Nepal son fonte de inspiración para os povos do mundo e centro dun importante debate para o desenrrolo da ideoloxia proletria. A aplicación das teses da Guerra Popular do camarada Mao Tse-Tung a revolución no Nepal permitiu derrubar unha monarquia feudal e avanzar a actual fase da Revolución Democratica e suas tarefas. Tarefas que teñen que ser levadas adiante baixo a dirección do proletariado e seu Partido en alianza co campesiñado e as capas da pequena burguesia patriotica. Apartarse do maoísmo seria avandoar o vermello sendeiro da revolucion e adentrarse no negro pantano do revisionismo e do reformismo burgues. Avanzar decididamente en prol da Republica Popular e do Socialismo coidandose das balas almibaradas da burguesia e do imperialsimo, que tratara de mercar a dirixentes e cadros con dadivas, sorrisos e prevendas tal é a grande tarefa que enfretan os comunistas no Nepal. Estamos seguros que seguindo polo mesmo senderio vermello da guerra popular o PCN-U (m) lograra a victoria definitiva sobre as forzas que oprimen a os povos do Nepal. Dende Galiza, unha nacionalidade sen estado que forma parte do Estado español os comunistas maoístas les desexamos os millores exitos pois a vosa revolución forma parte tamen da nosa. VIVA A REVOLUCION NO NEPAL E SEU PARTIDO ! VIVA O MAOÍSMO, TERCEIRA E SUPERIOR ETAPA DO MARXISMO-LENISNISMO ! VIVAN AS MASAS POPULARES, ELAS FAN A HISTORIA ! VIVA A REVOLUCIÓN PROLETARIA MUNDIAL ! VIVA EL M.R.I. Galiza Febreiro do 2009. COMITÉ DE LOITA POPULAR “MANOLO BELLO” COMITE GALEGO DE SOLIDARIEDADE CO NEPAL CORREO VERMELLO

Obviously this is a Romance language, but it looked really weird to me. I ran some of it through Google but I wasn’t getting any hits for Portuguese sites. Plus, though I’m not an expert on Portuguese, that does not look like Portuguese to me. I got hits for sites in Spain, but no way is that Spanish. At first I thought it was Catalan, but the “Comite Galego” line strongly implies that this is in the Galician language.

Hitler's Vienna Years

Was Young Hitler An Anti-Semite?* is the 5th chapter in a great book, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship, by Brigette Harmon. Hitler arrived in Vienna at age 17 in 1906. He became homeless and lived in men’s shelters, trying to sell his paintings. This fascinating chapter reveals that despite the virulently anti-Semitic character of much of Viennese society at the time, Hitler seems to have successfully resisted the prevalent anti-Semitism of the era. In fact, he had many Jewish friends, and Jewish art merchants sold most of his work. His worst enemy was a virulent anti-Semite, and one of Hitler’s Jewish friends had the man arrested for cheating Hitler. Hitler’s only statements on the Jews were ones of admiration. However, he already hated the Social Democrats. In Mein Kampf, Hitler rewrites his Vienna years as a time of his anti-Semitic awakening. But many autobiographies are dishonest. No one who knew Hitler at the time noticed the slightest anti-Semitism in him. Those who knew him at the time and then recognized him later as an anti-Semitic politician in the 1930’s were flabbergasted – they could not believe their eyes. There have been many silly theories of the genesis Hitler’s anti-Semitism – the Vienna years, an encounter with a syphilitic Jewish prostitute, run-ins with Jewish professors at the Arts Academy, a Jewish grandfather, a Jewish junk dealer who cheated him in Munich, but none of it makes much sense. People are just grasping at straws. Harmon logically decides that Hitler’s anti-Semitism developed during the war and then afterward. Lying in the hospital for three months, nearly blinded from a gas attack, he read about the November Revolution that brought the hated Social Democrats to power. In Russia, the Bolsheviks had seized power in their October revolution. At Versailles, the Allies were were setting about to destroy Germany once and for all – in league with the Jews, the anti-Semitic press charged. Hitler had an epiphany – it was all the Jews’ fault! And he resolved to get into politics. One sure-fire road to political success in those days was to promote anti-Semitism as a politician, because it was very popular with voters. So Hitler’s anti-Semitism was based both on his experiences during and after the war and on the cynicism of a political animal. Later, his anti-Semitism became more and more crazed and rabid to where even his fellow Nazi authors worried that it was his sole, driving and gnawing passion. Towards the end of the war, he sacrificed the war effort to kill more Jews. His suicide note warns of the Jewish peril to mankind. *From the website of the Porges family, a Viennese Jewish family who lost many members in the Holocaust.

References

Harmon, Brigette. 1999. Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship. New York: Oxford University Press.

Commies Killed More Than Hitler Redux

We went over this quite a few times on the old blog, but since this crap keeps recrudescing on the Right, we may as well continue to hammer away at it. From an interesting, but disgusting, article by Steve Sailer, effectively ruined, as are most of his posts, by his inability to turn off the rightwing talking points no matter what he is writing about. Sailer is like the Christian kooks, who, no matter what the conversation is about, always manage to return the conversation to their evangelical bullshit within 10 minutes. Steve just can’t shut the rightwing trap. Here is the poop:

Lenin, Stalin, and Mao slaughtered even more tens of millions in the name of equality than Hitler murdered in the name of inequality. And, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has pointed out, the doctrine of “class origins” transformed “egalitarian” mass murder into ethnic genocide since there is no sharp line between family and race.

Boy, rightwingers just can’t shut up about this, can they? Never mind that he’s quoting the fascist Solzhenitsyn (and he spelled his name wrong), but this whole line has a particularly nasty genesis. After the war, in trying to prove that Hitler was no big deal and Stalin was way worse, Ukrainian Nazis (Excuse me! Ukrainian nationalists! Wait. Is there a difference?) developed a lie called The Holodomor, a lie that was originally started by the Nazi Randolf Hearst and his Nazi buddies in Germany in the early 1930’s. The lie stated that Stalin deliberately killed 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, no wait, 7, 8, oh forget it, God knows how many Ukrainians by deliberate starvation. It’s not true. Nobody was deliberately starved to death. There was indeed a famine in all of the USSR, especially the Ukraine, in 1932 and 1933. The number of dead is not known. The state made many errors, including initially denying that it was happening, to a chaotic response to the tragedy. The Ukrainians were rebelling against the state. They destroyed 5 The USSR did seize the grain crop, because the country needed to eat and the Ukrainians were destroying everything in sight. Ukrainians were mass deported to Siberia, and 390,000 died. It was a bad time. The people were weakened by hunger and there were disease epidemics due to primitive sanitation and lack of effective drugs. This is what killed most of the people, not starvation. Most of the pictures of “starving Ukrainians” were faked, and those photos were actually from a famine in 1921. Mark Tauger has also presented good forensic evidence of a wheat rust epidemic. There was also a terrible famine in China during the Great Leap Forward that may have killed 15 million people, mostly due to disease once again. Once again, this was not intentional, unless idiocy is intentionality. The primary cause of the famine was overprocurement by the state. Capitalism kills 14 million people ever year by direct starvation and attendant illnesses all over the globe. Shall we tally up these body piles and compare them to Hitler, Stain, Mao and whatnot? The chips are down, capitalist punks. That means you, Sailer. Leaving aside famines, we really need to look at direct killings.

Leader         Deaths     Period      Years
Hitler          52M*      1933-1945   12
Lenin/Stalin    2.5M**    1921-1953   32
Mao             2.4M?***  1949-1976   27

*Figure from here. Hitler also started a war for no reason that ended up killing ~45 million people. Whether you want to count that or not is up to you. I count 12 million dead in camps and 40 million dead in a war that he started. **See Getty 1993 for the most accurate estimate to date of deaths under Stalin. In 1990, the USSR archives were opened up. The Soviets had kept track of everyone who died due to executions, population transfers and in the camps, year by year. The deaths in the camps include 900,000 common criminals, but I guess the anti-Communists want to throw those in too. There is no academic consensus whatsoever for 20, 30, 40, 43, or 110 million deaths under Stalin. Furthermore, these figures usually include “10 million” for the fake “Ukraine intentional famine” that never happened. As noted below, capitalism starves 14 million people to death every year. If we can’t tally these against the capitalists, we can’t tally them against Stalin. The Sovietologists are currently fighting it out in the academic journals. Those arguing for a higher figure are basically saying, “Commies lie.” There never was any rational basis for the figures of tens of millions killed under Stalin. Those figures were produced by Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, the CIA and the MI6. They were just pulling figures out of thin air. By the way, that wonderful 110 million figure comes from the fascist Solzhenitsyn, a man lionized by the West. Peacetime figures for political deaths in the USSR 1921-1953 are:

Executions:                 900,000
Deaths in the gulag:        1.2M
Dekulakization Ukraine:     390,000
Totals:                     2.5M

***2.4 million is my estimate for Mao, and those are just known deaths. The Chinese have not yet opened up their archives, and unfortunately it is possible that deaths under Mao were a lot higher. Mao himself admitted that 700,000 landlords were killed in the early years. The Party allowed the local peasants to put them on trial and the people sentenced many of them to death. Many were horrible criminals who had been abusing the peasants for many years, but one can argue whether they needed to die. There were 1 million excess deaths in the Cultural Revolution. We have no accurate figures for deaths under Mao from 1953-1966, although 700,000 is a good minimum. We also have no accurate figures for deaths in the Chinese gulags. We will have to wait until the Chinese open their books in order to find out the real number who died under Mao. The 77 million figure tossed around lately, the product of a lunatic new book, has absolutely no basis in reality whatsoever. Furthermore, it includes famine deaths in the Great Leap Forward, listed as an incredible 39 million. As I note below, capitalism starves 14 million people to death every year. Shall we count these deaths against the capitalists? Ok, as you can see, the evil Commies absolutely did not kill tens of millions of people. Who did? No one, unless you count the European War that Hitler started that killed ~45 million or so. Hitler killed 42 million in 12 years or 3.5 million/year. Mao, Lenin and Stalin combined killed 4.9 million over 59 years, or 83,000/yr. Ok, now who is the worse killer? Who killed more? Hitler. Mao, Stalin and Lenin combined were not able to exceed Hitler’s totals, and they had 10 times more years to do it again. Hitler was 42 times worse of a killer than Mao, Stalin and Lenin combined. The crap like Steve’s above is usually followed by some jibe about “more being killed in the name of equality than were killed in the name of inequality.” Of course, rightwingers, lovable and cuddly folks that they are, just can’t get enough inequality. They consume inequality for breakfast, lunch and dinner and they’re still hungry. What they hate more than anything else is anyone trying to even the score just a tiny bit. Making the world a little more fair than the cruel hand of fate fetishized by the Right supposedly “goes against human nature.” That’s dubious right there, and Adam Smith himself disagreed. In his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith noted that capitalism was incapable of providing for essential aspects of human society, such as compassion towards one’s fellow man, sympathy, mutual sympathy , and any type of fairness or justice in society. Since the market could not provide these things, their provision was left up to politics, or the state. Politics is only unnatural; it’s deadly, genocidally deadly. Any attempts to create a little justice or fairness in the human jungle are apparently doomed to end up in mass murder. So don’t you dare mess with that invisible hand of the market. If it’s market versus politics, the market wins hands down. The same market that starves 14 million people every year. The same market that kills 10 million kids a year. The same market that blew up the US economy and is threatening to take the world economy down with it. The blind faith of the Right boggles the mind.

References

Coplon, Jeff. January 12, 1988. In Search of a Soviet Holocaust. The Village Voice. Grover Furr’s website. Coplon, Jeff. March 1988. Rewriting History – How Ukrainian Nationalists Imposed Their Doctored History on High School Students CAPITAL Region. Douglas Furr’s website. Davies, R. W. and Wheatcroft, Steven G. 2004. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Getty, J. Arch, Ritterspoon, Gabor T. and Zemskov, Viktor N. 1993. Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence American Historical Review 98:4, 1048-49. Souza, Mario. Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union. North Star Compass website. Tauger, Mark B. 1991. The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933. Slavic Review 50:1, pp. 70-89. Tottle, Douglas. 1987. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard. Toronto: Progress Books.

Do I Have Jewish Blood?

I am republishing this post with quite a bit of new information on Henry the Second, King of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen Consort of France, and the Lombard tribe and later royalty of Germany, Austria, Hungary and finally Italy. The question has come up because some of the charming local anti-Semites are convinced that I must be part Jewish. They say that I look Jewish too. As far where I got the curly hair, I really have no idea. I think from my Mom’s side. No, I am not Jewish at all, sadly. Though I wish I was;  in a way, I want to be a Jew. I’m just a Judeophilic Gentile. My parents are both extreme Judeophiles who grew up with Jews and went to mostly Jewish schools. A lot of my Dad’s best friends were Jews, and those were some of the family friends that I grew up with. I even went to some kid’s bar mitzvah when I was a kid, and I thought it was really cool. Later I hung around Hollywood and LA for years with the music crowd, the artist crowd, the movie crowd and the writer crowd. All those scenes are swarming with Jews, and Hollywood in general has Jews everywhere. I worked in Beverly Hills for a while, and that place is full of Jews too. What’s weird is that even though I’m a Judeophilic Gentile, lots of folks keeping calling me an anti-Semite. So really, I’m a self-hating Judeophilic Gentile. We have done our genealogy going back a very very long time, and there is not the slightest trace of Jewish blood. I am 5/8 British (English, Scottish, Welsh and Scots Irish), 1/4 German (Swiss German and Bavarian) and 1/8 French. Some of my relatives came over on the 2nd Mayflower boat and others came over from Bavaria in the early 1700’s and became Pennsylvania Dutch. Others were the early French in Canada. The Scottish side comes from the Isle of Uist in the far North. Going way back, I am related to some royalty named Eleanor of Aquitaine who was related to Charlemagne. Eleanor was Queen of the Franks, and her son was Richard the Lionhearted. The Franks were originally a Germanic tribe in far western Germany,  but the Western branch, West Francia, later became the Kingdom of France. She was a Capetian (Capetian Dynasty, Direct Capetians, otherwise known as the House of France), a large French family similar to the Carolingians, and was a Queen Consort of the King of France, in this case, Louis The Seventh, or Louis The Young. Queen Consort is not the same as Queen. The French did not allow Queens, so the high-ranking women had to be called Queen Consorts. He later divorced Eleanor because they fought a lot, and she only gave him two lousy daughters and no sons. He had to divorce the biatch in order to keep the throne, so dump her he did. Eleanor later married Henry II, King of England. This was a good marriage from his POV, since he gained 1/4 of France by marrying her. Henry is known in some English histories as “Good King Henry”, but this is controversial. Henry was a ferocious and hot-headed redhead, who was armed at all times with multiple weapons, moved continuously  and exercised maniacally. Henry had a great sense of humor and did not put on airs. He mingled well with the ordinary people and never acted like he was better than they were. An early proto-socialist, he ordered that 1 Later he conquered Ireland, initiating an 800 year period of English rule over Ireland, so to the Irish, I am sure this guy is evil incarnate. He also conquered all of the forts in southern Scotland, so the Scots probably hate him too. This was during a 200-300 year period (around 1100-1400) in which the Scottish were engaged in continuous wars of rebellion against the English. Robert the Bruce is possibly the best known of the rebels. By around 1300-1400, the Scottish had pretty much secured their independence. The first thing they did was destroy all their southern forts so the English could not reoccupy them. Henry II tried to get rid of trial by ordeal and trial by combat, the standard ways of trying accused criminals, which were not exactly fair trials. He initiated something similar to a Grand Jury as early as the 1100’s. His intemperate language incited his friends to kill Thomas Becket, a priest who had been constantly thwarting Henry’s efforts to reduce the influence of the Church in the affairs of the state. This murder outraged Eleanor and most of Europe, and most people blamed Henry. This famous event was fictionalized in a play and later a movie called Becket, which I have not seen. Late in life, his own son made an alliance with his worst rival and overthrew him. Henry was forced to pay homage to this rival, Philip Augustus. All of his kids except his illegitimate son abandoned him late in life when he was in poor health. Lying in bed, ill, at this time, attended only by his illegitimate son, he noted that his legitimate kids “were the real bastards.” He died in 1189. Eleanor always fought with Henry, but she bore him 8 kids. She  encouraged her sons to rebel against her husband (What a bitch!) early on, and Henry appropriately sentenced her to house arrest for 15 years. Eleanor later assumed the throne after his death and pronounced herself Queen of England, and she expanded on Henry’s “grand jury” trials towards a more “ordinary citizens” type of trials. At her court in exile in France, she reportedly held “love trials” presided over by juries composed of 12 peers, for couples in love. Eleanor was very beautiful, probably a redhead. At one time, a single heir to royalty with an extensive land claim in France, she was said to be the most eligible woman in Europe. Henry and Eleanor were also portrayed in the Lion In Winter, a play and later a movie which I have also not seen. Peter O’Toole played Henry in both movies. Before the Normans and Franks, we trace one of our lines all the way back to the Post Roman Empire to a royal family called the Lombards in northern Italy. This is another Germanic group that left southern Sweden about 2,500 years ago, moved to Germany, then moved down to northern Italy. Initially, the Lombards settled in the Lower Elbe River Valley in northern German near Hamburg. They were pagans, initially having a fertility cult religion (the cult of Vanir), but later becoming worshipers of Odin (the cult of Æsir). Vanir was a typical agricultural society religion, while Æsir was a typical religion of a warrior society. They grew their beards very long, which is where their name “Longbeards”, from Langobards, or Lombards,  is derived, according to Paul the Deacon in his Historia Langobardorum or History of the Lombards. The long beards were apparently a consequence of their Odin-worship, since the God Odin has a very long beard. They were also ferocious and fought with many of the surrounding tribes. The first Lombard migration, from 489 to 493, was probably due to bad harvests. It took them south to the Danube, probably around Austria and western Czechoslovakia, place called Vergundaib (probably the ancient home of the Burgundes or Burgundy tribe). They stayed there for 33 years until they undertook another migration, this time taking them to Western Hungary, to a place called Pannonia. Map of Lombard migrations. In Pannonia, the Lombards came into contact with the Sarmatians, an Iranian people (more probably related to Ossetians). From them, they added an element of religious symbolism, particularly a statue of a bird on the end of a long pole. When a warrior fell in battle and his body could not be returned for burial, his family would put this bird-pole in the ground near their home, with the bird’s head pointing towards the direction where the warrior was presumed to have fallen. In 568, they moved again, this time over to northern Italy, where they quickly conquered most of northern Italy from the Byzantines. When they arrived in Italy, some Lombards were still pagans, while others had adopted Arian Christianity (see post on Arianism). In the next 150 years, most Lombards had converted to Orthodoxy (Catholicism) and had taken Roman names, titles and traditions. Note that even after the Fall of the Roman Empire, it continued to exert influence both culturally and theologically through the Catholic Church. The Lombards were completely converted to Christianity by around 650. Before then, in Italy they had practiced a nominal Christianity with many pagan elements. The Lombards remained in northern Italy until 776, when they were conquered by Charlemagne. In the 700’s, two Lombard kings, Aistulf and Desiderius, conquered almost all of Italy. Fullest extent of Lombard rule under Aistulf. Later the Lombards ruled a territory called the Principality of Benevento, in southern Italy. This lasted from 774-879. Benevento is now a town in southern Italy in Campania, 25 miles northwest of Naples. In Beneveto, Lombard Catholicism reached its apex, shown by the archetype monastery of the period, the Monte Cassino. This abbey was destroyed during World War 2 where it was the site of a huge battle, the 5-month long Battle of Monte Cassino, between Nazis and Allied troops in the Allied invasion of Italy in 1944. The Allied forces thought incorrectly the the monastery had been turned into a fortress by the Nazis. During this time Charlemagne (the Frankish Carolingians) was conquering much of Italy, but he was not able to conquer Benevento. At this time, Benevento was stuck in between two empires, Charlemagne’s to the north and the Byzantines to the east. During the 800’s, Benevento fought a series of wars against Byzantine-allied Duchys in southern Italy, eventually conquering much of Southern Italy. In some of these wars, both sides hired Arab mercenaries called Saracens to fight for them. The Saracens soon went viral, splitting off from the men who hired them and attacking infidels all over Southern Italy. Islam eventually conquered all the way up to Capua, 16 miles north of Naples. In 915, the Pope forged an alliance between all of the Christian forces of Southern Italy and Islam was defeated at the Garigliano River in Southern Italy. The Arabs,  and Islam,  were thrown out of Italy by the forces of the Cross. Once again, mercenaries were to prove deadly. The Lombard states had called in Norman mercenaries to help them fight the Byzantines in Apulia. But soon the mercenaries had gone feral, just like the Arabs before them.  By 1058, the Normans had conquered the Lombard state of Capua. In 1078, the Salerno Lombard state fell. The Capuans rebelled in 1091 and formed their own state that lasted for 7 years until the Normans reconquered it in 1098. The Normans were not very good rulers, and their states were largely independent and tended to decline under their lackadaisical rule. The Lombards regarded the Byzantines as oppressors and the Normans as Northern Barbarians. At around 1100, the saga of the Lombards seems to fade into history. As you can see, with the Norman conquest of southern and central Italy in 1050-1100, a linkage between Normans and Lombard royals becomes possible. Hence, this may be the historical linkage of my Norman line via Eleanor and the royal Lombards of Italy. I believe there is some linkage between the Franks and the Lombards. The Lombards would be considered Dinarics, racially, and so would the Bavarians on the other side, so if you go back 1,500 years, my stock is Dinaric or possibly Noric (in between Dinaric and Nordic). Later on, the Norman branch is Nordic. If you are talking about non-Whites such as Black, Indian or Asian, there is none of that in me either, although there is a 5

What is Arianism?

Arian Christianity is also known as Early German Christianity, because it went over best with ancient German tribes (Gregory of Tours) . Arianism was based on the notion that Jesus and God had not been eternally co-existent for all time. That is, according to the First Council of Nicea in 325, the Church held that when God created the world, Jesus was already there with him, alongside him, “uncreated”. Arianism was officially declared a heresy at this council. The Arians, rationally in my opinion, held that Jesus was actually created by God at some later point. In other words, there was some period, probably a long time, when God alone existed and there was no Jesus. At some point, God created Jesus and probably soon sent him down to Earth. It’s hard to believe that this was one of the worst religious fights in the Catholic Church around the 300’s and that to this day, Arianism is considered a heresy in the Church. However, there is a small Arian Catholic Church in England, with some home churches here and there around the world (website here). Arians also reject the virgin birth, holding that it is a misunderstanding of prophecy. The prophets had merely held that Jesus would be born to a “virgin”, but that word really meant just “young girl.” Due to a misunderstanding of prophecy, “young girl” was mistranslated to “virgin”, hence the Cult of the Virgin and other nonsense. The Arians hold that indeed God can sometimes commit miracles,  but he cannot violate the very physical laws that He Himself has laid down. Seems like a reasonable split in Catholicism. Too bad there isn’t an Arian Catholic Church near me. I might want to attend services.

References

Gregory of Tours. 539-564. Decem Libri Historiarum (Ten Books of Histories), or Historia Francorum (The History of the Franks). Translated by Earnest Brehaut. 1916. New York: Colombia University Press.

New Flynn Effect Study

There is an interesting new study out about the Flynn Effect (ecstatic over this very depressing news, since they hate the Flynn Effect with a passion. If ever there was a reason not be a WN or even a hardcore hereditarian, this is a great one. It has to be one of the most atavistic, depressing, misanthropic and pessimistic movements around. They’re overjoyed that people are getting stupider and furious that humans might be getting smarter. This is because WN’s, like all racialists, are all about genes = destiny,  however much they lie and deny it. They hate the idea that the environment can have any positive effect on anything, but I guess they accept that the environment can have a negative effect. Whatever! Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that the IQ’s of British teens are apparently 14 points higher than they were in 1942. They’re also higher than the Brits of the 1950’s, 1960’s and even 1970’s. After 1979, there seems to have been a 2 point drop at the high end of age range of the sample. So there must have been a 16 pt. rise from 1942-1979. From 29-66 years ago, British IQ’s rose at a very high rate. The British of today have higher IQ’s than the Brits of 29-66 years ago. Now, since 1979, there has been a very modest drop of less than 1 pt per decade in the very oldest teens. And! In the last 30 years, IQ’s of 5-10 yr old Brits have risen 15 full points! The WN’s are going on and on about how the reason for this is because the UK is increasingly Black. Forget it. Britain is Nor can increasing Black This leaves us with Flynn’s explanation, which seems to explain things well. British teen culture is dumbing down, and race has nothing to do with it. WN’s always says that Flynn refuses to admit that Blacks have lower IQ’s than Whites. Although he is a Leftist, Flynn readily acknowledges that Blacks have lower IQ’s than Whites. Flynn has titled the study Requiem For Nutrition As The Cause Of IQ Gains Raven’s Gains In Britain 1938 To 2008. WN’s are chortling that this means that the entire Flynn Effect is nonexistent, since Flynn supposedly predicated it on increased nutrition. Wrong again, racists. Flynn never stated that nutrition was the sole effect of the FE, and he has always been dubious about that. The Flynn Effect of a secular rise in IQ is a fact. What it means and what is causing it are what is up for grabs.

References

Flynn, James. 2009. contribution to support more of this valuable research.

The Motto of the Holocaust Deniers

Contradictory agendas are pretty common with humans, conflicted critters that we are. Back in my doper days I used to run across dopers who were adamant about how much they hated dope, but yet there was a punch line at the end. Their song went: “I hate dope! Dope sucks! Only losers do dope! You do dope? You’re a loser! You’re a scum!…Speaking of which … Dope … Hey! … Got any? The Holocaust Denier sings a similar darkly humorous tune: “The Holocaust never happened, but let’s do it again, and this time let’s finish the job!” Yeah right. You guys expect us to fall for that? How dumb do you think we are? You don’t even believe in Holocaust Denial yourselves. That’s just for the consumption of others, huh? You’re lying and you know it. SMH.

Mutual Intelligibility in the Romance Languages

Whether or not I am a reliable source for the question of mutual intelligibility has been questioned in a debate on Wikipedia. It’s been suggested that I am an amateur linguist – that is, I am not a real linguist. This is not true. I am in fact a real linguist. My credentials are that have an MA in Linguistics and have worked in the past as a professional linguist for an Indian tribe in a paid position. Here is an here, that no one can understand French except the French. Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Romanians, no one can understand the darned French. This makes sense to me. I can’t understand a word of the local French-speaking tourists, and I had a semester of French. They always talk like they are holding their noses. This is interesting in light of the fact that Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian have 8 Spanish speakers have a better understanding of Italian. Italian and Spanish have 8 That’s for spoken communication. For written communication, French and Italian can understand each other a lot more. The same is true with Spanish and Portuguese. They can understand the other language when written much better than when spoken. What is interesting is that everyone accepts that Spanish, Portuguese and Italian are separate languages, despite 5 However, in the cases of Austrian/Bavarian, Swabian (spoken around Stuttgart) and Mainfränkisch (Moselle Franconian, close to Luxembourgeois), these three languages are only 4 Romanian also seems to have some understanding of both Spanish and Italian. Romanian speakers say that they moved to Italy, could immediately pick up a fair amount of the conversation, and picked up Italian very fast. Romanians have ~6 Vice versa, Italians living in Italy run into Romanians regularly and say that they can understand Romanian quite well. Spanish speakers say that they can understand a fair amount of Romanian, and Romanians can understand even more of their Spanish. Spanish and Italian have 7 Catalan may be about 60-7 Looking for a nice dialect continuum across Europe where you can keep on understanding people everywhere you go? Try this, starting at Portugal: Portuguese, Mirandese, Fala, Galician, Asturian, Aragonese, Spanish, Catalan, Gascon, Occitan, Auvergnat, Provençal, Franco-Provençal, French, Gallo, Picard, Jersey, Guernsey, Walloon, Romansch, Friulian, Ladin, Lombard, Ligurian, Piedmontese, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Venetian, Italian, Neapolitan, Corsican, Sicilian, Sardinian Gallurese, Sardinian Logudorese, Sardinian Sassarese, Sardinian Campidanese, Latin, Moldovan, Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Macedo-Romanian.

References

Jensen, John B. 1989. contribution to support the continuation of the site.

English and Its Closest Relatives

In the last post, we looked at Scots, the closest language actually related to English outside of English creoles. That’s according to Ethnologue anyway. There are only three languages in the Macro-English section, English, Scots and Yinglish, which is Yiddish English. From Ethnologue (note Fishman is Jewish):

Professor Joshua A. Fishman says, “‘Yinglish’ is a variety of English influenced by Yiddish (lexically, particularly, but also grammatically and phonetically). Any good English dictionary will now include 50–100 (or more) ‘borrowings from Yiddish’ (Yinglish)…. These forms are now used not only by Jews but by others, inversely proportionally to their distance from NYC. In the case of non-Jews the original Yiddish meaning may no longer be known and a related metaphoric or contextual meaning is intended…. Since the variety is only used… (by speakers who can always speak ‘proper English’) Yinglish is never a first language acquired by the usual process of intergenerational transmission. French, Spanish, and Russian counterparts (also a Hebrew counterpart) also exist, but are more restricted in nature, both in size as well as in availability to non-Jews”. Jewish. Second language only.

At first I thought this was a preposterous, but a commenter notes that “it is English with a heavy Brooklyn accent spoken by older Jews and peppered with Yiddish words and phrases.”  Ok, maybe that makes sense then. Still, I don’t see how that gets in and Geordie (an extremely diverse English dialect) or Scouse (Liverpudlian, likewise), Scottish English or even AAVE (Ebonics) doesn’t make it. Hell, I’ll take Queens New York English before Yinglish. We looked at Scots earlier. Listening to some Scots tracks, you can pick up a bit of it here and there. It’s hard to say how much you can get. 2 There’s a lot of silly talk around about mutual intelligibility. German and English are said to be slightly intelligible, and if German is, you know Dutch must be. It’s frequently said that the language Frisian, spoken in the northern part of Holland, is somewhat intelligible to English speakers. Frisian is doing ok; it’s relatively secure at the moment. According to commenters at the end of the post, it even has some monolingual speakers. Wow, I never would have expected that. Frisian been separated from English for possibly up to 1000 years, and if you listen to Frisian, this is what languages sound like after they drift apart for 1000 years. That massive dose of Latinate that went into English did not help matters. Nevertheless, English and German share 6 Here is an interview with a top Dutch model, Doutzen Kroes, for a promotional campaign promoting the use of the Frisian language. I believe it is all in Dutch. I could barely make out of a single word out of this 5 minute Dutch language tape. I got a few words, but that is only because I happen to know some Dutch words here and there. Obviously, that doesn’t count. I got about I will say that Dutch has a bit of a familiar rhythm to it, does it not? It’s not Spanish, French or Italian. The prosody has that English feel to it somehow. The next video is an interview with the same top model in which she responds in Frisian to questions directed at her in Dutch and English. Don’t look at the Dutch subtitles, because you’ll pick up a lot more words that way. I got the word for “no” in Frisian and that’s pretty much it. But there was a lot of background noise. Comprehension was around Let’s try another one. In this one two Frisian poets, Tsead Bruinja and Albertina Soepboer, are interviewed about their upcoming books of poetry. All dialect is in Frisian, clear of background noise, crisp and clear diction. Later Bruinja reads some of his poems in a playground. It was shot in Groningen by Omrop Fryslân, a group that produces Frisian shows on Frisian TV. They have Frisian TV! Cool! In the comments there are some English speakers claiming that they could pick out enough of it to get the basic understanding. As for me, I could not make out a single damned word. Comprehension was If Frisian and Dutch are this bad, I’m not even going to bother listening to a tape of German. This bit about English and German having some intelligibility seems ridiculous. A lot of language is about prosody and rhythm. Even if you can’t get a word of that Frisian or Dutch, the rhythm is there. If you have ever heard Old English or try to make it through Beowolf, you will hear that sound in Frisian also. This goes to show you what 6 Keep in mind that Japanese and Korean supposedly have 6 I got a weird and creepy sensation in my body as I watched that Frisian tape. Frisian is a look into our past as English speakers, back to the days before the Angles, Saxons and Jutes got on boats and took off for England long, long ago. There was a fascinating show on the Discovery Channel a while ago in which the journalist takes a crash course in Old English and then tries to use Old English to buy a cow from a Frisian farmer. The Frisian farmer can actually sort of understand the Old English! Weird…

On the Scots Language

The notion that there is a language called Scots, separate from the English language, instead of just a Scottish dialect of English, makes a lot of folks hopping mad. There is a regular reader who is Scottish who refuses to accept this. The reason is that if you listen to Scots carefully, it does sound like they are speaking a grotesquely distorted and bizarre form of English. But the thing we linguists keep hammering away at is that if you can’t understand people, they are speaking a different language. People just can’t seem to accept that. It’s true that Scots is very close to English. Some say that Scots must be more than 9 So, bottom line is that Scots is just flat out unintelligible to the vast majority of English speakers. What does unintelligible mean? According to SIL, unintelligible means you understand less than 7 If you ever tried to watch Trainspotting, you know what I am talking about. I think it had subtitles when released her, and it sure needed them, because I could scarcely make out a single word they were saying. Keep in mind that intelligibility differs by individual. A good friend of mine said he watched that movie and figured out the lect about 1 hour into the movie and then was able to make sense out of it, but I never got it. He’s also a musician, so that may have something to do with it. There’s increasing evidence that musicians are better at language than others. Polyglots are often musically talented. In a lot of ways, language is all about the ear. To make matters worse, the lect in Trainspotting was not even the real deal, hardcore Scots. It’s just basic Scottish English, not even real Scots at all. It gets pretty hard to figure out where true Scots, Scottish English with heavy Scots interference, and Scottish English proper begin and end. There are five main dialects of Scots: Insular Scots (Orcadian/Shetlandic),  Northern Scots, Central Scots, Southern Scots and Ulster. As the commenter below notes, intelligibility is quite difficult among dialects of Scots, and it looks like we are looking at more than one language here. Lafayette Sennacherib,  a Scotsman, writes:

In Scotland, if you go five miles in any direction you encounter a dialect that no one else understands, roughly based on English, but as if there has been little population movement in or out of each little region for 500 years, which is quite possible. There is actually no broad Scots; the poems of Burns are in the dialect of the county of Ayrshire, spoken only there and then. These days, I as a Glaswegian (from Glasgow, though living in London) find it really hard to understand Ayrshire people when they lapse into dialect, even though it’s little more than 20 miles away. The Edinburgh dialect in Trainspotting is also completely foreign to me, again from only 30 miles away. As for Shetland or Aberdeen…I worked with a guy from Aberdeen for a year, and only picked out about half a dozen words in that time – if he spoke to me I’d just look philosophical and utter, “Ay mate.” Funny that although there are lots of accents in the USA, the language is so uniform when there are so many people from so many places. But maybe that’s why – they have to learn a standard dialect to communicate with each other.

Here are some audio samples of Scots from a village called Rosehearty. Here is some more Scots, a 2 minute recitation of a New Testament story. Here are some samples of Ulster Scots, which is pretty much the same language as Scots. This is Philip Robinson reading from a novel called Fergus An The Stane O Destinie. This is clearly a foreign language! This is nothing like Scottish English at all. It’s simply another language altogether.

Mandarin and Putonghua or Standard Languages and Their Dialects

I recently received a comment, which I deleted due to tone, which asked how I could possibly state that Putonghua (Official Mandarin) is incomprehensible with “Mandarin”. Truth is, there are 1,500 dialects of Mandarin. Putonghua is only an official form of Mandarin based on some of these dialects and instituted after 1949.  In time, Putonghua itself has changed so much that it is no longer intelligible with the pure form of the very dialect that it was based on! Furthermore, new forms of Putonghua have already developed that are incomprehensible to other Putonghua speakers! The truth is that forms of a language may not be intelligible with each other. That is why I (with the assistance of some of the world’s top Sinologists) am working to redo the classification of Sinitic and carve new languages out of it based on intelligibility. As it stands, there are 14 Sinitic languages. Based on intelligibility, there are far more than that. The Chinese style of promiscuous use of the word “dialect” for both languages and dialects has been very destructive in terms of our understanding of what is really going on there. Similar things occur in many large languages. Within Macro-Dutch, we probably have 14 different languages, Dutch, 10 forms of Dutch Low Saxon, Zeews and Flemish, and that’s just getting started. For one thing, Flemish is looking like more than one language. None of these lects are mutually intelligible. So there is “Dutch” and then 13 other languages under the “Dutch” rubric. Within Macro-French, there are 4 languages, Standard French and three others – Cajun French, Walloon and Picard. None of these lects are mutually intelligible. Actually, there are quite a few more, but those are the only ones accepted at this time. There are 20 different forms of Macro-German – Standard German, Eastern and Western Yiddish, Lower Silesian, Upper Saxon, Bavarian, Cimbrian, Mocheno, Hutterite German, Walser, Swabian, Colonia Tovar German, Schwyzerdütsch, Pennsylvania German, Kölsch, Limburgisch, Pfaelzisch, Mainfränkisch and Luxembourgeois. None of these lects are really mutually intelligible. Actually, there are more than that, but those are the only ones that are recognized. So we have “German” and 19 different languages inside of “German.” Within Macro-Italian, we have Standard Italian and 13 other languages – Dalmation, Istriot, Neapolitan-Calabrese, Sicilian, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Lombard, Ligurian, Piedmontese, Venetian and four different kinds of Sardinian – Sassarese, Gallurese, Logudurese and Campidanese. None of these lects are really mutually intelligible. So we have “Italian” and 13 different languages inside of “Italian.” These stuff drives laypeople and Internet cranks completely insane, but linguists look at all it and shrug our shoulders. National chauvinists are particularly irked by this stuff. Italian nationalists say there is “Italian” and the other 13 languages are Italian dialects. Dutch nationalists insist there is one Dutch and the other 13 languages are Dutch dialects. German nationalists say there is German and the other 19 languages are German dialects. There’s a tendency among these types to not accept that languages closely related to theirs are actually separate languages and not dialects. This is due to the consolidating, assimilationist, anti-liberationist agenda of the nationalist. You can go around the Internet and see the wild debates ranging over whether Scots is a separate language or a dialect of English. What’s interesting is that inside the field and especially in academia, all this stuff causes is just yawns and shoulder shrugs. But outside of the field, ordinary folks are driven mad by this. This is one reason why people want you to get a degree in a field before you call yourself some kind of an expert. People who call themselves linguists, anthropologists and economists who lack degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Economics have a strong tendency to not know what the Hell they are talking about. Many are hacks, cranks and fringe nuts. Within the fields themselves, especially in academia, there tend to be consensuses about a variety of things, a deep familiarity with the basics of the field and most importantly, a spirit of collegiality and professionalism. I have nothing against autodidacts in principle, but they often lack all of these things. Go to sci.lang on Usenet and look at all the autodidacts calling themselves linguists. They are passing themselves off as the world’s leading experts while having raging debates that you won’t hear one peep about in academia. None of these guys would last 10 minutes at a university. It always pissed me off when people said, “You can’t be a [whatever] unless you have a degree.” But I’m starting to understand what they are talking about. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Bring Em Young

Ee gads. I swear this is bordering on child abuse.
Ee gads. I swear this is bordering on child abuse.
Little kids are so cute! Eeek. The Nazi virus is a terrible illness, and it even strikes young children. Of the kids in the photo, focus on the two on the right. Notice the alien, Vulcan-like red eyes. The red eyes are a sure sign of an infection of the Nazi virus, an indication that any last shreds of humanism have long departed the hollow Nazi soul of the afflicted child. From Finland. Those are three young Finnish brothers, posed by their neo-Nazi mother. I was starting to get worried about why so many Finns were going to look at that famous Russian neo-Nazi video on the old site. Now some of my worst suspicions are being realized. The USSR was so damned aggressive in WW2, attacking Finland and the Baltic states, attempting to annex Finland and actually annexing the Baltics, that it left a long-term bad taste in the mouth of these blond and blue northerners. Hatred of Communism and the USSR often goes along with seeing Nazis as liberators, if only from the hated Soviets. I always thought the Winter War (USSR vs Finland) was retarded. Anyone want to try to justify it for me?

Finn Joke

Lots of ethnic groups get insulted, but no one ever insults the Finns. This is grossly unfair. They have very high rates of depression and heart disease, never smile, hate Russians pathologically, like to dive into freezing cold water in the middle of winter like lunatics, have no gourmet foods to speak of, and have an insanely difficult language that is frankly incapable of being learned by anyone not a native speaker. It’s time to dog on the Finns! Hey, did you hear the one about the Finns? They were Finnish before they even started. Har har. I used to date this 1/2 Finnish, 1/2 Russian girl named Tami, and damn was she beautiful! Blonde hair, blue eyes, smart, happy, friendly, oh yeah!

Why Were There Survivors in the Concentration Camps?

Some charming Holocaust Deniers in the comments threads (They are nicest people!) have mocked the Holocaust, asking why there were survivors at all from the death camps. The answer is complex. The camps were not necessarily set up for immediate extermination. Even at the death camps, some were selected for the gas right away and others were selected to remain alive at least for a while. These were worked as slave labor, given very little food, and packed together. Many died of starvation and disease, but that was the idea. The idea was to torment them, get some work out of them, and slowly kill them. Other camps were full on labor camps. Auschwitz was pretty much a gigantic factory. At some of these camps, people managed to stay alive for a long time, possibly years. Some also become favored Jews, kapos, or developed relationships, including sexual ones, with camp staff, and stayed alive that way. The guards needed to have some inmates on their side, kind of like in a jail where they have trustees and whatnot. As you can see in the photos on liberation, many of the inmates were not in very good shape, to put it mildly. At the end, they emptied the camps and made them go on death marches, where a lot of them died or were murdered. I suppose they could have just lined them up and shot them in the camps, but they did not do that. There was a large element of sadism, perversity, torture, torment and slow death to the whole enterprise. Further, the Nazi project regarding the Jews was of two minds. Part of the project dealt with killing Jews immediately, and another dealt with keeping them alive, but usually slowly killing them, in the camps over a period of time. And some Jews were just left alive – kapos, girlfriends of guards, etc. The Holocaust was not so much a master plan but an act of madness. As such, its purposes frequently clashed, and in many cases, were poorly developed and even contradictory. The Shoah also seriously hampered the war effort, especially towards the end when trains needed for the war effort were diverted in order to kill Jews, seriously harming the military. So the Jew-killing was not even rational from a military POV. The Nazis were almost afflicted with a Jew-killing psychosis. The notion of exterminating some, leaving others to perish of starvation and disease, and packing others in camps to work them to death until starvation and disease took them over can be seen in the Generalplan Ost intended for the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Belarus. So the Shoah and Generalplan Ost were actually similar, and in Generalplan Ost we have a model for the Shoah, though a much more merciful one. A better analogy would be that Poland and its quisling General Government were Generalplan Ost in praxis.

Some Thoughts on Central Planning

Project Cybersyn. Fascinating stuff.

It consisted of Telex machines located in workplaces communicating information in real time to a central control system.

It even had a control room! And supposedly it worked pretty well, too. Surely, with Moore’s Law and all and the advances in software and programming theory, not to mention various forms of AI, computing is now vastly more advanced than it was 36 years ago? Via Eastern Star, a link to a book called Towards a New Socialism (1993) by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell. From the site:

Update on computer speeds: One of the themes of our work is that the speed of modern computers makes a real difference to the feasibility of efficient economic planning. In Socialist Planning After the Collapse of the Soviet Union, for instance, we assess the time-order of the calculations required for planning in detail a ten-million product economy. We use for reference the figure, at that time on the cutting edge, of one billion calculations per second for an advanced multiprocessor. Such figures date quickly. IBM recently announced (Feb 12, 1998) the signing of a contract with the US Department of Energy and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the delivery, by the year 2000, of a computer capable of 10 trillion calculations per second — 4 orders of magnitude faster than our 1993 benchmark.

Their argument is that the new computer speeds means that the argument over the inefficiency and unworkability of central planning in an economy is now in a whole new ballpark. This is said to be an answer to the Economic Calculation Argument by Mises, Von Hayek, Friedman, etc. that says that a centrally planned economy can never work. The free marketeers actually have some interesting arguments to throw out there, and you can argue that they have history on their side. At the collapse of the USSR, it was said that Gosplan was only able to calculate prices for some 500,000 of the 3 million products (!) being produced by the “failed socialist state”. First, I wonder how a failed system even produces 3 million different products a year, but anyway…it’s clear that Gosplan was overwhelmed. Socialists who agree with the free marketeers’ argument have countered with “market socialism”, which I am not necessarily opposed to at all, except no one seems to know exactly what it is. One way of doing this, according to a journal article I read, is to devolve control of the workplaces to the workers, but with control over investment versus profit-taking left to the state. Plants that started losing money would simply close, thereby avoiding the problem of money-losing state firms. Control over workers’ investment decisions was necessary because the Yugoslavian experience showed us that workers, given the chance of reinvesting profits in plants versus taking them home in their pockets overwhelmingly preferred to take them home. This resulted in deinvestment in the plants and resulting breakdown of the infrastructure, eventually making the plant unable to function competitively, or at all. In the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Country of Spain, plants are owned by workers technically, but actually they are owned by large regional banks. The banks make the decisions of whether or not to take home profits in workers’ pockets or to reinvest in the plant. This non-capitalist form of ownership has worked very well! My father always counters by saying, “Ok, so then why isn’t everyone doing it?” Hey! It’s a non-capitalist form of ownership. Capitalists run the planet. They don’t like non-capitalism forms. They can’t make money off them. Duh. In China, there is already something like this. The #3 producer of TV’s in the world is actually a Chinese publicly-owned firm , and it’s competing quite well, if I do say so myself. China has devolved many public enterprises to the level of local municipality and labor collective, the forms that actually run these plants. Much of China’s explosive economic growth in the 1980’s and early 1990’s was actually coming out of these publicly-owned firms. In China, I believe that Chinese firms still must technically be owned by the workers. This is described by Time Magazine as a “Maoist-era anachronism” (Mao insisted, evil bastard that he was, that workers actually own the firms – evil seems to know no limits) that the capitalist roaders (yes, that is what they are) in China are chafing to get rid of. I don’t want them to get rid of it. Worker ownership in China is a good thing. Now many plants are actually run by municipalities. Cities run them either well and make lots of money or poorly and don’t make much money, so there is competition within the socialist sector in China. The ones that do well can expand, pay and house their workers better, so workers flock from all over to these cities to try to get jobs with the firms that are doing well. In one city that was written up, control of profits versus investment was run by the municipality, and they required that workers plow back in 9 Cuba has recently found that there are some efficiencies (!) in large state farms for certain crops (sugar cane, potatoes, beef and poultry) versus having them grown by small farmers in plots of 10 acres. Cuba is now making plots of up to 10 acres available to any small farmers who wish to take them up, and there has been a flood of applications, but the small farmer way is not necessarily Utopian. Back to Cockshott and Cottrell’s book again, although they claim to have solved Hayek’s “calculation objection” (see the Economic Calculation Argument link above) which theoretically makes any planned economy doomed to failure. That’s a good step forward right there. C & C argue that socialism was able to overcome the calculation objection by the mid-1980’s due to the increase in computing power. Nevertheless, the planned economy still has problems, many of which are economic and hence nearly beyond the reach of the average reader. But we will go into them nevertheless. C & C offer no plausible solutions to any of the following dilemmas: The problem of lack of incentives in a socialist society remains. Che Guevara’s famous “moral incentives” crusade never really worked out very well. Innovation, lack of it, or lack of incentives for innovation are also a crucial problem in socialism (in my view, nearly fatal). I would argue that assuming that the state has to money to do so, persons making critical or groundbreaking innovations in society should be rewarded warmly – possibly with awards of say 1 years salary for each significant breakthrough. There is a problem in that economic planning and centralization seem to engender social planning and political centralization, making the planned economy almost automatically undemocratic in praxis. They offer a plan to allow regular citizen referenda on all sorts of things, done via touch-screen TV’s in every home. The problem of the nearly inevitable development of a capitalist black market in any planned economy remains. As does the problem of an inevitable brain drain of the best and the brightest to capitalist countries where the labor rewards are so much better.

The Morgenthau Plan

I can’t believe that we actually did this. Reading this Wikipedia article, one assumes that the Wiki piece must have been written by neo-Nazis. Surely that could not be the case. The truth, then, resembles neo-Nazi propaganda about US aims and behavior in the first half-decade after the war. It’s funny because you go looking for research on the case and mostly all these neo-Nazi sites come up. You read through them and think, “Yeah, but their Nazis, so you know they’re lying.” I think they are definitely exaggerating, but I was blown away by how close the neo-Nazi sites’ descriptions of this plan mirrored its actual implementation. Not that I sympathize with Nazis. My general rule is when you start reading neo-Nazi stuff and you have to nod your head and say, “Wow, these guys are definitely not good for the Jews, but how can we deny that what they are saying is true,” that means not that Nazis are cool but that something is rotten in Denmark. When you read Who Rules America, and nod your head at the Nazis’ analysis of Jewish media power, that’s not good. When you read William Pierce on Russian Jews bleeding Russian dry and participating in a White slave trade of East European Orthodox Christian girls to Israel and nod your head, that’s not good. It’s not good when the Nazis are right. Not good for the Jews. Not good for anyone. Same with this Morgenthau Plan. Not that Nazis, or Germans (What was the difference, anyway? Most Germans, but not all for sure, were Nazis all right) didn’t more or less deserve it. Yeah, paybacks are a bitch and all that. But I also think you should give people a good reason to surrender. Surrender to we can enslave you, starve you to death, let you die from disease, de-industrialize your country and maybe kill 20 million of your countrymen is not a very good reason for me to put down my gun and quit shooting. If there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to kill me anyway, why not die on my feet, gun blazing, like a man. That was the mindset of the Warsaw Ghetto, a tragic but noble one. Give people a reason to live, for Chrissake. Same reason I’ve always opposed beating up people who are arrested. Having been cuffed a couple of times and manhandled by the cops, I figure the cops want to beat up everyone they arrest. What’s the point? Getting arrested is bad enough. Being imprisoned is bad enough. Losing in a war is bad enough. You should treat your former enemy kindly enough so he does not want to take up arms against you again. I also think that there was something just intrinsically wrong about starving all those Germans to death and raping all those German women. Whether they deserved it or not, I still don’t think it was right to do it to them. As above, there’s no point to punishing the defeated in war. Defeat alone is punishment enough. The neo-Nazi sites claim 13 million excess German deaths 1945-50 via this plan. Wiki doesn’t give a figure, but you wonder if the Nazis are right on that one too. Remember. Anytime Nazis are right, it can’t be good. Ross Vachon’s Semitism Run Wild is an excellent exploration of the Morgenthau Plan, drawing analogies to the neocons as latter inheritors of the Morgenthau throne.

The Mutual Intelligibility of the Scandanavian Languages

In the comments section, heg clears up some of the nonsense about the dialect chain in Scandinavia. It’s commonly held in Linguistics that Danish, Swedish and Norwegian form a dialect chain where they can all understand each other, more or less. Heg points out that this is not really true. First of all, Heg says that in Jutland, in Denmark, a language called Jutish is spoken. I was aware of this, but I was not sure how different Jutish was from the rest of Scandinavian. Jutish speakers can understand Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, but Danes, Norwegians and Swedes can barely understand a word of Jutish. Heg also points out that Scots, a separate language from English spoken in Scotland, sounds much like Jutish. He says if you can understand Jutish, you can understand Scots. This is very interesting, because Scots really is just an Old Saxon lect, let’s face it. Three tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, from southern Denmark and northern Germany, migrated to the UK in the 600’s. This Germanic tongue became Old English, which, if you have ever tried to read Beowulf, is quite unintelligible to English speakers. As an aside, there is an Dalecarlian. In fact, Dalecarlian itself is split into multiple varieties that are not even intelligible with each other. There are lects way up on the northwest coast of Sweden near Norway, in Bohuslän that are not intelligible to other Swedes. Gutnish, spoken on the island of Gotland, is not intelligible with Standard Swedish. There are also some highly divergent and unintelligible lects way up in far northern Sweden such as in Överkalix, Scanian is not fully intelligible with intelligible with Swedish, although this is controversial. Jamtska is said to be fully intelligible with Swedish.. Heg says that most Danes understand most Norwegians and vice versa. One of the Norwegian spelling systems was copied over from Danish (Norway was long a Danish colony), and the other was a nationalist response to this that was based on the Norwegian language actually spoken in Norway at the time. So began the Bokmål and Nynorsk wars in Norway. It’s freezing cold up in Norway, and when they aren’t being evil progressives and engaging in The New Anti-Semitism, Norwegians sit around and engage in the stupidest fight over language that I have ever heard of. Oh well, if it’s that cold, you may as well argue about just about anything if only to warm yourself up. reading about this language fight, I still can’t make heads or tails of it. I always try to narrow complex issues down to make them more understandable, but this is one case where I could not do it. The fight makes no sense in sociopolitical terms. It’s about as sociopolitical as people arguing about which way to put the toilet paper on the roll, in or out. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. Donations are the only thing that keep the site operating.

Standard French Was Not Based on the Parisian Dialect

A very smart female commenter (Why is that foreign women always seem so much smarter than American women?) corrects me on an earlier post in which I said that Standard French was based on the Parisian dialect:

I’m afraid you are wrong saying standard French originated from Paris. Bernard Cerquiglini, in Une Langue Orpheline shows Standard French was in fact elaborated by the “British” administration in today’s western France (Normandy, Anjou) and mixed with other local scripta (the Picard and Champenois ones). Its adoption by French kings came later. The “Parisian origin” was a construction of French republican ideologists of the XIXth century. As a government lingua franca, it has become more and more distant from local, non-written, dialects of French.

Excellent. I love learning stuff like this. What’s important is that as a government lingua franca, it has moved further and further from local forms of French, which in most cases, are actually separate languages altogether! See the cases of Picard and Champenois above. Those and other forms of “French” are not intelligible to speakers of Standard French. How do they communicate? Via Standard French. A very similar thing has occurred in Germany with Standard German, in which a wide ranges of other forms of German are spoken in the country in addition to Standard German. Most of these, like the French lects, are not yet recognized by Ethnologue (only Picard is recognized, and, but Normand, Bourguignon, Champenois, Franc-Comtois, Gallo, Poitevin, Santongeais and Lorraine, (all apparently separate languages, not dialects as Ethnologue states, as I believe that they are not intelligible with Standard French) are not. As for Angevin, Berrichon and Bourbonnais, I am not sure if those are dialects of French or separate languages. In Germany, many more German lects are recognized by Ethnologue as separate languages, for instance Alemannisch, Bavarian, Cimbrian, Colonia Tovar German, Eastern Yiddish, Kölsch, Limburgisch, Luxembourgeois, Mainfränkisch, Mócheno, Pennsylvania German, Pfaelzisch, Plautdietsch, Low Saxon, Upper Saxon, Lower Silesian, Schwyzerdütsch, Swabian, Walser, Westphalien, Western Yiddish. So you can see that there are 21 different kinds of German, mostly spoken in Germany, which are not intelligible with Standard German. There are actually more than that, and I have to do a writeup on that some day. Similarly, in Italy, there is Standard Italian, and then there are a variety of other Italians, many of which are separate languages. I will go through the Italian lects at another time. The lect chosen as standard is often rather artificial, though it is often based on the language of a large city, often the capital. I think that Standard Dutch is based on the Amsterdam dialect, but correct me if I am wrong. Over time, the standard form tends to drift further away from the other lects, though there is also a reverse tendency whereby the other languages start to wear down under the influence of the standard language, and come to resemble the standard language more and more. We find this happening in Germany, France, Italy and China, where the other Germans, Frenches, Italians and Mandarins are starting to look more and more like the Standard language as they come under pressure from the standard language.

Standard Languages Versus Their Parents

In my older post, I characterized the Beijing dialect of Mandarin as a separate language. This has come under criticism as it has been pointed out that Putonghua (Standard Mandarin) was based on Beijinghua, so how could Beijinghua be a separate language? When I started that project, I certainly thought that Beijinghua would be intelligible with Putonghua, until I did a lot of reading and found out otherwise. In my research, I determined that many people find the Beijing dialect to be unintelligible. Stories about unintelligible taxi drivers in Beijing are legendary. So what happened? Obviously, Putonghua and Beijinghua diverged at some point. Others say that Putonghua was based on the speech of the Beijing suburbs, and not on Beijing city itself. Yes, lects do differ that much in China. I am told that even inside large cities, people from different parts of town speak dialects that have diverged so far that they are not mutually intelligible. I have even heard that there are villages where the people in the north of the village cannot understand the people in the south of the village. Certainly there are plenty of folks claiming that they understand Beijinghua at less than 9 Interestingly, a similar thing has occurred in Italy, where Standard Italian was based on Tuscan in the 1860’s, yet has diverged so much from Tuscan that now if you see old men from Tuscany on TV, you need subtitles to understand them. Something similar has happened to German and French. There are actually multiple lects spoken in Germany that appear to be separate languages from Standard German. Standard German is an East Middle German or East Central German dialect that was simply chosen as standard. It’s the lect from around the state of Saxony in the 1500’s and 1600’s.It was mostly a written language until Upper Saxon, spoken around Dresden, Chemnitz and Leipzig – that may or may not be intelligible with Standard German. In France, there is not one form of French spoken. Although everyone speaks Standard French, there are various French languages spoken in France that are not intelligible with Standard French. These include the languages of the Channel Islands – Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Europe, Linguistics, Regional8 Comments on Standard Languages Versus Their Parents

Mutual Intelligibility in the Romance Family

It is often stated that speakers of the Romance languages can all understand each other. I’m not really a fluent speaker of Spanish, but I can speak it ok. I have known some Brazilian Portuguese speakers, and they definitely could not understand Spanish well. And the Latin American Spanish speakers I knew insisted that they could not understand Portuguese. I’ve known some Italian speakers too. I tried speaking Spanish to them in order to communicate with them, but that was a pretty useless exercise. The Italian speaker I know right now admits he can’t understand Spanish. I find this whole theory to be ridiculous. It’s been shown that even Asturian has only 8 Even Galician, as close to Portuguese as you can get, has only 8 The “dialects” of Italian are so distant that many of them are separate languages altogether. Why? Because they are unintelligible. And that’s right there within Italic itself. Franco-Provencal has only partial intelligibility with French, and that’s quite close to French as you get. Bottom line is the whole notion of “Romance speakers can all understand each other” can be put to rest. On the net recently, I found these excellent comments on the debate.

The supposed mutual intelligibility of Spanish and Portuguese is greatly exaggerated. Spanish/Portuguese speakers can mutually STRUGGLE through very basic conversations (and usually while speaking very slowly, changing their normal speaking accent, and utilizing lots of hand motions to aid communication), but not much more than that without study. The phonology of both languages is dramatically different. And Spanish and Italian are almost not at all mutually intelligible. Too many words, and constructions are TOTALLY different. People need to stop repeating this lie of Spanish/Italian mutual intelligibility… …I live in an Area (Newark NJ), that has a lot of Portuguese immigrants, and local Hispanics are perplexed by the language they speak, and do not even recognize it at all, and much less understand it. You’ll hear Puerto Ricans and Dominicans say things like: “What language was that? Was that Russian?” Portuguese often gets mistaken for some kind of obscure Slavic language by Spanish speakers who have never been exposed to it… …Most people who have never had contact with Portuguese won’t have the slightest inclination of what a Portuguese speaker is saying, and if so, very little… …Italian and Spanish are not that closely related, and as a general rule are NOT mutually intelligible at all.

Indeed, I would say that that about sums it up. I can understand a fair amount of Spanish on a video, but I recently watched a video of Wally Gator dubbed into Brazilian Portuguese (the old Hanna Barbera cartoons are insanely popular to this day down in Brazil) and I could barely make out a damned word. One thing that I noticed is that if you know one Romance tongue, you can pick up another pretty fast. I dated a Brazilian woman once and I used to speak to her in Spanish while she spoke to me in Portuguese. Within mere days, I was picking up the Portuguese, with the help of a dictionary of course. I’m now learning some Italian through interacting with an Italian translator of my work. It’s so much easier since I know Spanish. I suspect that the other much-daunted “intelligibility chains” between the great languages are pretty much like the above with Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Note that in the same linked web discussion, there are some individual speakers of Spanish or Portuguese who claim that they can easily understand the other language. This is why linguistic evaluation of mutual intelligibility is such a minefield. Different informants give you all sorts of different responses. One of the big problems with mutual intelligibility testing is that when dealing with closely related dialects or languages, speakers can pretty quickly start to understand the other tongue after listening to it for a while. I’m not really sure what to do in cases like this. You would have to ask the experts like the folks at Ethnologue who run around doing intelligibility testing of speakers all over the world. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. Donations are the only thing that keep the site operating.

Englishes, Portugueses, and Chineses

In the comments to a previous post, Goyta made several comments. First of all he noted that the differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese are considerable, especially when a Brazilian hears a less educated, working class or rural Portuguese.

He also said that when European Portuguese are interviewed on Brazilian TV, Brazilians wish they had subtitles. Wanting to have subtitles when you see a video of someone speaking is actually a symptom that you are dealing with another language. He said the differences are particularly severe when it comes to IT. He said he cannot understand 9

It does appear that the differences between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are pretty significant, more significant than the differences between US and British English.

On other hand, I find Hibernian English spoken in Ireland to be nearly incomprehensible, though it is said to be just a dialect of English. It’s clearly been influenced extensively by the Irish language. Scots, the regional English spoken in Scotland and exemplified by the movie Trainspotting , is actually a completely separate language from English. That movie actually needed subtitles. On the other hand, there is a Scottish English dialect that is not Scots that is pretty intelligible.

We can always understand British English no matter who is writing it. Same with understanding spoken Australian and New Zealand (Kiwi) English. British English is often written a bit differently in slang expressions, but we pick them up. The formal writing is totally understandable.

There have been huge fights on Wikipedia between British English and US English speakers with complaints from the Brits of bullying by the Americans. There was an attempt to fork the English Wiki into Br and US versions but it failed. Wikipedia demands that you have an ISO code in order to get a Wikipedia and ISO codes only come from SIL, who publishes Ethnologue. I petitioned for a few new languages a couple of years ago and they all got shot down.

There is an ongoing war between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese on the Portuguese Wikipedia with complaints from the European Portuguese of bullying on the part of the Brazilians. Gotya noted that he, a Brazilian, could not read Portuguese IT materials. This is unfortunate. All written British is intelligible to us. We can read anything written in the UK, though most of our reading material here is from the US. I can read The Economist and The New Standard and The Spectator with no problems at all.

As a Californian, I speak completely normally, of course, and have no accent whatsoever! Haha. We can understand the Midwest accent perfectly, though it can be different. It sounds “flat”. They also insert rhotic consonants before some consonants at the end of a word and the raising of the preceding vowel – “wash” becomes “worsh”.

The Oklahoma accent is different and sometimes it can be hard to understand. I heard some people speaking Oklahoman in the doctor’s office the other day for a minute or so I thought they were speaking a foreign language! Of course they were mumbling too. Then I asked them where they were from and they said Oklahoma. At that point, I had caught onto their accent and could understand them perfectly.

I do not know why the Texan accent is said to be hard to understand. We understand it perfectly, but it sounds funny. We make a lot of jokes about it. George Bush has a strong Texan accent. There is also an Arkansas accent (Arkies) that is different but understandable. This is also the source of jokes. In this part of California there are many Whites who still speak Arkie and Okie. They are the descendants of those who came out here from the Dust Bowl in the 1930’s. Steinbeck wrote a book about this called The Grapes of Wrath.

Other than that, there are no accents in the West.

There is some sort of a Kentucky-Tennessee accent, but I am not sure if they differ. This is also a source of jokes. It’s sort of a general Appalachian accent, and it’s the source of jokes about inbred hillbillies and whatnot.

The Southern accent is well-known but usually understandable. My brother went to live in Alabama though and he said that the workers in the factory he worked at were often completely unintelligible. The Blacks were worse than the Whites, and they had separate accents. He has imitated their incomprehensible accent to me and it’s pretty hilarious.

I have heard poor Blacks from Memphis on the Cops show who were completely unintelligible to me. People with more money and status tended to be more comprehensible. I sometimes have a hard time understanding a Mississippi or Alabama accent, but it’s no problem. Our Southern politicians all have thick Southern accents.

Cajun English from Louisiana is often unintelligible to us, but the people with more money and status are quite intelligible.

There is also a Black accent from the coast of South Carolina called Gullah that is hard to understand. The Blacks from around there speak something like it and you can pick it out if you are sharp. It has a pretty, lilting sound to it. It’s different from the standard Southern accent and is sort of charming. Moving up the coast, there is a Virginia accent that is softer, pleasant and charming.

There is the famous New York accent, which to us laid back Californians sounds horribly rude, obnoxious, loud and belligerent. Some forms of it also sound ignorant – these tend to be associated with working class Whites in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

One thing they do is to glide and lengthen rhotic consonants – “New York” becomes New Yawwk” “Brooklyn” becomes “Bwwoklyn”.

A similar accent seems to be spoken in New Jersey, but it may be different. One again, it involves lenition of rhotic consonants, in this case turning them into dipthongs with long vowels. “New Jersey” becomes “New Joiisey”. This is also a source of jokes. There is a Boston accent which is completely understandable. Ted Kennedy speaks that. It involves the lenition of hard consonants into glides and the end of a word – “car” becomes “caw”.

I believe there is a sort of a slow drawl from Vermont and New Hampshire too. Those people, especially the older men, are known for not talking much. Men of few words.

Some Blacks around here still talk with thick Black accents that sound Southern even though they were born in the Central Valley. There is also an “Ebonics” English (for lack of a better word) that is spoken here by sort of ghettoish or semi-ghettoish Blacks. It is frankly, almost completely unintelligible. They seem like they are talking with their mouths full, mumbling and speaking extremely fast, running all of the sounds together.

Everyone who talks like this can also speak Standard English thank God, and they can quickly move in and out of that Ebonics talk when you talk to them. It’s sort of a language for them to talk so that we can’t understand them, I think. To us, it sounds sloppy, low class and ghetto, but it reportedly a full-fledged language. The Blacks in the Caribbean do not speak English! That makes me feel good because I can hardly understand a word they say. Each island has its own form of Creole English which is a completely separate language.

I think that Indian English (Chichi derogatorily) and West African English need to be split into separate languages because they are often incomprehensible to us. This is a case of regional Englishes evolving on their own. Further, West African English often differs a lot in its written form.

Indian English is often so mangled in its written form that it is incomprehensible, but more educated writers are comprehensible. The tendency to drop articles is very annoying and makes written Indian English sound ignorant to us. Don’t mess with our damned useless articles!

Reading about the Chinese languages, there are efforts underway to get speakers to speak proper Putonghua, whatever that means. Speakers from different parts of China still speak Putonghua with an accent that can be heavy at times.

Here in the US, we do not have this problem. Even our politicians still speak in heavy regional accents, and no one cares. We can always understand them. There is no national effort to get everyone to speak proper English that involves wiping out regional accents, though I understand that in the corporate world, they are offering classes to help people get rid of Southern accents, which are stereotyped as sounding backwards, ignorant and racist. I think this is sad. Our regional accents are what makes this country great.

Goyta also notes that Brazilians are starting to speak Spanish and the neighboring Spanish speaking countries are starting to speak Portuguese. When I was dealing with them 5-10 years ago, most Brazilians did not speak much Spanish (They acted like it was extremely low on their list of priorities) and Spanish speakers had zero interest in learning Portuguese (In fact, they regarded the suggestion as offensive and preposterous!)

Goyta notes that with regional integration, more Portuguese are speaking Spanish and more Spanish speakers from nearby countries are learning Portuguese. Spanish is becoming a prerequisite to getting a good job in Brazil. This is good as it’s good to see Latin Americans getting together.

It is also true that in China there has been a big fight over Chinese language classification. The unificationist – fascist types, associated with the Communist government (and actually with the Nationalist government before also – this is really a Chinese elite project) insist that there is only one Chinese language. This goes along with racism of Northern Chinese against Southern Chinese and to some extent vice versa. This racism is most evident in the Cantonese vs Mandarin war in China.

Cantonese speakers say that they speak the real Chinese and that Northern Chinese speak a bastardized tongue derived from the old Manchu language. Cantonese speakers also resent that a Northern Chinese was turned into the national tongue and imposed on them against their will. They also say that Northern Chinese are really from the South and that the real NE Asians are the Mongolians, Koreans, Manchu, Japanese, etc. Genetic studies show that this is not the case.

Northern Chinese say that Southern Chinese are not real Chinese and their blood is “contaminated” with Tai types like the Tai, Zhuang, Vietnamese, etc. There is probably something to this. Although Putonghua is the only official language in China and there is a war going on against the regional Chineses, enforcement has been held off against Cantonese. And Cantonese  areas are still where you will hear the least Putonghua and the most regional Chinese in all spheres of life. Cantonese is also allowed on the radio and TV, whereas regional Chineses had previously banned from the media.

The Putonghua-only campaign has been too successful and regional Chineses are being wiped out. There is now a regionalism movement arising in China to promote and retain regional Chineses.

I think that the Putonghua campaign has been good, but that China should promote bilingualism. The Putonghua campaign has not yet been successful. As of 2001, only 5

China clearly needs a language that they can all speak. For its entire history, many Chinese have not been able to speak to each other, including folks from one village to the next if you go to the southeast and the central coast. Provinces like Fujian, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Henan and Hunan are notoriously multilingual.

Most of these places have a lot of very high mountains, and transportation was typically very poor. Even today, you can scarcely get around by vehicle and you sometimes have to walk from one place to the next, sometimes for dozens of miles! Bottom line is they were very isolated from each other.

These places also retained a tradition of being hideouts for “hillbilly” types where there was a lot of unemployment and many folks turned to crime. Also criminals fled to the mountains where they could hide. Upshot was that due to all of this, and people seen as backwards, lazy, stupid and thieving, people from the rest of China had no interest in going to these places anyway. When people left these parts of China to go to big cities, they were stereotyped in a way similar to how ghetto Blacks and Browns are in the US. This made them want to stay in their mountains.

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